Goodnight, Noises Everywhere by Feisty Y. Beden

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5650508/1/

Chapter 1: Dark

When I closed my eyes, I could almost forget. I could imagine that everyone I
loved was still alive, that the house was quiet just because it was night and
everyone was asleep. I could pretend. I didn't know what was worse: simply
accepting the present, or deluding myself as much as I could, only to be crushed
over and over again when I opened my eyes and could not ignore the evidence in
front of me, plain as day.

It was still my bed. It was still my home, but no one else was here. No one else
would ever be here. I shivered under my comforter. Charlie had bought me this
comforter when I started high school. I'd told him I was too old now for my pink
gingham. I'd been pretty snotty about it, too—I was ashamed to think of it now,
full of regret—but he'd come home a few days later with this beautiful bedding
set, grown up, feminine, but not frilly. It was perfect. Charlie. I choked back a
sob. I knew I wouldn't be able to fall asleep here again tonight.

When I opened my eyes, it was as dark as it had been when I'd squeezed my
eyes shut and tried to pretend that we were back, ten, five, even one year ago,
before the epidemic. I didn't know what time it was; the battery in my watch had
died months ago. I wished I'd had an old wind-up watch—I think Grandpa Swan
had had one. But even I could find it, even if it hadn't been destroyed or looted,
how would I know how to set the time? And did time matter anymore?

I opened the door, not needing light to get from my room to Charlie's. I tried to
push away my last memories of him alive, of him pale and shivering and covered
in sweat. "Stay away," he'd rasped. "It's too late for me now."

"But, Daddy, I … don't care. Don't leave me. Daddy, Daddy," I'd said. My cheeks
were wet, and I realized I was muttering Daddy, Daddy, Daddy out loud. I angrily
wiped the tears away. I tried to picture Charlie healthy, Charlie picking me up
and swinging me around while hugging me tightly, Charlie coming home reeking
of fish and the outdoors, that special smile he had just for me. "You need to live,
baby girl," he'd said, clumsily waving me away with a leaden arm. "You need to
live for me."

Charlie picking me up from school. Charlie taking me to the mall to buy new
shoes. Charlie burning our dinner and flapping his oven-mitted hands like a
befuddled Muppet, trying his best not to swear in front of me. I forced the good
memories in, breathing heavily and clenching my hands into fists.

But the bad ones always seeped back through the crevices: the day he'd come
home, eyes wide and glazed over, stumbling as he tried to unlace his shoes.
Collapsing in the foyer. I was stronger than I thought, letting him lean on my
shoulder as I guided him up the stairs and to bed. "It's nothing," he'd said. "It's
not … that." But we both knew he was lying. He was one of the last ones to get
sick, and I'd foolishly thought—or had forced myself to believe—that maybe we
Swans were made of such hearty stock that we'd survive this, that we'd be
spared.

I was at his door now, and I pushed it open lightly. It still smelled like him,
mostly like Charlie alive, but the scent of death clung to the walls like an oily
residue. I crept to the bed where he'd died, where he'd slipped away like sand
through my fingers.

"Stay away, Bella," he'd said. "Please." But I wouldn't. I knew when Charlie went
that I was going to be alone. I didn't want to live alone. I wanted to catch what
he had, to go with him. So many had already died, so many friends. God, I
wished anyone else from school had survived, even bitchy Lauren Mallory. What I
would have given just to hear her say something obnoxious about my clothes or
my face right now. Why was I chosen? Why was I seemingly immune to this
mystery virus? Was this my hell? I had crawled into bed with him as he tried to
push me weakly away. I'd wrapped my arms around him and rocked him to his
final sleep. "May the road rise up to meet you; may the wind be always at your
back," I'd sung to him as his spirit escaped with his final breath.

I crawled into the bed, next to the pillows I'd dressed in Charlie's old clothes. If I
tucked my head against the flannel and breathed deeply, I could almost imagine
it was really him, even though the pillow had no warmth, no heartbeat. I
snuggled against the shirt, the hard plastic buttons leaving an imprint on my
cheek, and it soothed me enough that I felt a little drowsy again. I foggily
remembered science class, when we'd learned about the Harlow experiments[1]
on baby rhesus monkeys. With my head resting on Charlie's old shirt, I could
understand why the monkeys would choose the terrycloth mom.

I buried my nose into Charlie's fading scent and tried to put out of my mind that I
was lying in the place where he had died.

He had died only once. Death was just one small part of this bed. I tried to
remember all the nights he was alive, sleeping here, and I could hear the blood
rushing in my ears from the vacuum of sound all around me.

In a few hours, it would be morning, a new day, whatever that meant now. It was
meaningless. The sun would hang uselessly in the sky, a pretty bauble, nothing
more. The sun, with its incongruous, even disrespectful cheeriness. What was
there to shine about? Who would love your warmth? Who was left for you to
nourish? I almost wished it just stayed dark all the time. It would be easier.

I closed my eyes and clutched the pillow tightly to me, praying for the oblivion
that sleep would bring.

Outside, the air hung still and heavy, and I knew I was the only one breathing,
the only heart beating.

I wished I could hear crickets, but it was just me, my chest rising and falling, the
rushing of blood in my ears. It was just me.

And it would only be me, now and forever, amen.

Chapter 2: Prelude

I was doing my homework in the living room while Charlie was flipping through
channels. I got good grades, so he didn't care where I worked on my

assignments. It was nice quiet time we could spend together. The chatter from
the TV barely filtered through my ears; it was mostly pleasant white noise that
helped me focus. But something about this one news report … I didn't know. Of
course we'd all been wary of H1N1. We'd all been advised to wash our hands,
stay at home if we were sick, and for the most part, Forks was spared from the
swine flu. "Don't call it that," Charlie used to say. "It's disrespectful to bacon."
Then he would bow his head in reverence, observing a moment of silence for the
holiest of meats.

It was a small story. We'd gradually grown immune to stories about H1N1. It was
the only way to live our lives. Neither of us wanted to live in fear. After all, every
day Charlie faced danger and the possibility of being shot. Even though Forks was
one of those leave-your-front-door-unlocked kind of places, being a cop, no
matter where you were, was a dangerous job. We'd gotten used to blocking out
the warnings from the CDC because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to
leave the house, too afraid to breathe the air. And that was no way to live.

But this story … why had it pierced through my stubbornly constructed walls?
Why had it pulled me out of pre-calculus problems?

Three people in Denver, Colorado, have died from complications of a mysterious,
flu-like illness. Their family members each reported a severe fever, shakes, and
sores. The Centers for Disease Control deny claims that the illness is related to
H1N1.

I'd had an uneasy feeling in the pit of my belly through the short news item
sandwiched between the latest celebrity scandal and the usual bipartisan
bickering, and I instinctively leaned back against Charlie's legs, seeking security.
"Don't worry, Bells," he'd said. "I'm sure it's nothing." I nodded and bent my
head again over my math homework, calm for the moment, because he'd said it
was okay. He'd always protect me; that's why he was here.

The next day, ten were dead. The day after that, one hundred. It seemed
confined to Denver. Legionnaire's Disease, they theorized. Food poisoning, some
optimists suggested. The new millennium's plague, whispered the paranoid. The
conspiracists said the government must have poisoned the water supply; the
religious zealots said the End Times were near. People were afraid of bio-
terrorism, of germ warfare.

The government went to Denver immediately, trying to keep the city isolated.
They shut down the airport, put roadblocks on the highways. They didn't
understand what was happening, but they wanted to keep it confined. America
could lose one city. The rest of us would be safe.

"What's going to happen to us, Dad?" I asked as we sat watching the news in the
middle of the day. They'd closed the schools in Forks "just in case," even though
the strange illness seemed to be localized, far from us.

"They'll figure it out, kid," he'd said. And I chose to believe him because I was too
afraid not to.

The world kept its eyes on Denver. The few brave, or incredibly stupid, national
news teams stationed there showed us a city dying, civilization devolving to its
basest forms: the looting, the hoarding, the random killings, and other sprees of
violence. It was as if once they knew they were doomed, they were living out
their darkest fantasies—after all, they believed they had nothing to lose. Charlie
shut the TV off when we saw the first live-on-TV murder. "We don't need to see
this," he said.

Day by day, Charlie stocked up on water, canned goods, wind-up flashlights and
radios. "Do you think that'll be necessary, Dad?" I asked, biting my lip as I helped
him unload the car from yet another trip to the grocery store.

"Don't know," he shrugged, "but I'd rather be over-prepared." He saw the look on
my face and drew me in for a hug. "Don't worry, kid, nothing's going to happen
here. We just won't have to go grocery shopping for ten years. I hope you like
Beefaroni."

"That's not even a word, Dad, let alone a food," I said, poking him gently in the
ribs.

Within the month, Denver was gone.

No one talked about it. After the initial hysteria, we pretended nothing had
happened, that Denver had just been a fairy tale, an imaginary place. The TV in
our home grew dusty, neglected, as Charlie and I dared not turn on the news. In
town, everyone smiled with tight lips, nodded their heads curtly in greeting.
School started up again, because life had to go on, but not even the teachers
could focus on education. We all lived in a gray spiral of panic under a fragile,
calm exterior. No one wanted to admit how scared we all were. Being scared
would make it real. It wasn't real. If we didn't believe in it, it did not exist.

Maybe our denial worked. A few months passed, and we thought maybe it had all
been a fluke. We were safe. Denver had been contained. Denver had never
existed. The world would go on turning; we would go on living.

Charlie's friend Billy Black was over one night with his son Jacob. It was no secret
that Jacob had always had a bit of a thing for me. It was flattering, maybe a little
embarrassing. Charlie and Billy were talking quietly in the kitchen while drinking
beer, leaving Jacob and me in the living room.

"Hey, so what do you think?" Jacob asked, suddenly turning toward me on the
couch.

"Think about what?" I asked.

"Do you think the world is ending?"

"What? No, of course not," I said a bit too stridently. "What are they saying back
where you guys are?" The Blacks were members of the Quileute tribe and lived in
the reservation at La Push.

"I don't get to hear most of what's going on," he admitted, "but there have been
a lot of meetings of tribal elders after Dad thinks I've gone to bed. I think things
are bad, Bella, and I think no one is going to be ready for what's coming."

I shoved him playfully in the shoulder. "You're just trying to scare me, you with
your ghost stories and Doomsday warnings."

"What if it were just the two of us left in the world?" he asked. He laughed
nervously. "Would you repopulate the world with me?"

"Gross, Jacob. Gross," I said, shoving him again. "Don't talk like that."

"Why not?" he asked, jutting his jaw out.

"First of all, nothing is going to happen. Second of all, don't make me think of
your junk."

Jacob whistled low. "Ouch. Not even if I were the last man on earth," he said,
shaking his head with wounded male pride.

"Don't be silly," I said, smiling. "You're not a man."

He rolled his eyes at me. "Am too a man," he muttered. "I've got the short and
curlies to prove it."

"Seriously, dude. Gross," I said, whacking him in the chest with the back of my
hand.

I tried to remember the last time I saw the Blacks. After Denver, things went
back to normal for so long that I had stopped trying to memorize every moment,
believing it to be my last. Everything was fine, and death was once more just an
abstract concept, just a word on a page.

The weak sunlight woke me in Charlie's room, and I remembered, again, that I
was alone. You'd think I would have gotten used to it by now, but I'd dream of
my normal life, of the time when my biggest worry was wondering if anyone was
going to ask me to prom, how I did on the SATs, whether Charlie would be able
to afford college. I even still had nightmares of showing up to finals not having
studied and having lost my pants. I'd wake up in a sweat and remember the
present, and laugh bitterly to myself that there used to be a time where my fears
were so mundane.

Evenings were hard, but mornings were harder, because sleep made me forget.
Sleep made me feel like a normal girl with silly, shallow problems, with hopes and
dreams and fears, with friends and family. When I woke up, I'd remember that I
wasn't normal at all. If I were normal, I'd be dead, like the rest of them. If I were
normal, I wouldn't be alone.

Was I imagining it, or was the sun was fading a little bit more every day? Was it
not as warm on my cheek as the sun of my youth? I got out of Charlie's bed
carefully and opened the window. I examined the sun with squinted eyes, and it
gazed back at me with its impassive, pale yellow face. I stretched my hand out
the window to cup some sunlight in my palm, but I felt just the air.

I walked back to the bed and tucked pillow-Charlie back in, straightened his
sheets. "Morning, Dad," I said, even though I knew he wasn't there. I got dressed
because I needed the routine, slipped on faded, fraying jeans, an old t-shirt. I
raked my fingers through my hair, greasy and dirty. It hadn't rained in a while,
and I didn't have enough water at the moment for such frivolities as washing.

My stomach rumbled, and I wished for the sound of eggs frying in a cast-iron
pan, thick, buttermilk pancakes oozing with syrup, strips of bacon, the holiest
meat. I could almost imagine there was a big breakfast waiting for me as I
walked to the kitchen with my eyes closed, but I knew there would be only cans,
the manual can-opener, and utensils wiped clean with a damp cloth waiting for
me. I opened a can of fruit cocktail, hating the way the spoon tasted when it had
scraped against the metal of the can. I drank out of the old milk jug I'd filled with
rainwater, taking only enough sips to wet my mouth.

I read the morning paper, the last one that had been delivered before Forks had
been hit. I knew every headline and story by heart, every punchline of every
comic strip. But I read it sitting cross-legged on the faded living room carpet
anyway. The hours were long, and there was little to do. I waved the remote
control at the TV and pretended that I was channel surfing. "There's never
anything good on," I joked weakly out loud, my voice sounding strange in the
dead quiet of the house. I walked up to the TV and dragged my finger across the

dusty screen. I tried to draw a smiley face, but I didn't have even that in me. The
mouth was flat, turned down at the end. "I know how you feel," I said to the
face, and I wiped my fingertip on my jeans.

"I'm going out," I announced to no one at all, and walked out the front door,
leaving it wide open. After I'd walked down the driveway, I turned around and
saw the door swaying slightly, as if it were waving me goodbye.

I waved back, not caring how silly I must have looked, until I remembered that
there was no one to see me anyway.

Chapter 3: Collide

Swinging my arms casually, I walked in the middle of the road, right along the
double yellow line, no longer having to worry about traffic. I was making my daily
rounds. I'd pretty much raided all the houses around for non-perishable food, but
some houses had reeked too much of decomposing bodies, those poor souls
who'd been the last ones in their families to go, with no one to take them
somewhere for burial. I periodically checked those houses to see if the stench had
faded enough to bear entering and searching for anything I could use.

I thought again of how glad I was that I could be there for Charlie. I thought
about my last moments with him, with his lifeless body, wrapping him in the flat
sheet so I could pull him along the floor, drag him down the stairs. I couldn't
believe he was no longer in that familiar body. Where had he gone? He was still
warm. As I tugged the corner of the sheet, I got a sick feeling in my stomach as
his head thumped heavily against each stair. "Sorry, oh god, I'm sorry," I kept
saying. I knew he wasn't in there anymore, not really, but oh, it was hard to
believe I wasn't hurting him. Nothing can hurt him now, I reminded myself. I
found a tiny sliver of relief in that. I could feel some comfort thinking that Charlie
was no longer suffering, no longer afraid.

If I focused on him, on his escape, his peace, I could keep myself from panicking
that I was the only one left.

I could not have been in my head as I dug the shallow grave in the backyard. The
flat sheet was surely stained by now, his heavy weight crushing the blades of
grass, releasing the chlorophyll as his body flattened a path in the lawn. I knew I
wouldn't be able to drag him very far, and there was no way I could lift him into
the truck to take him anywhere. Besides, this way, he'd always be near me. I
began to dig with the shovel my dad had used to plant trees and make our home
beautiful. My hands soon were sore and aching and beginning to blister, my back
slick with sweat from the effort of digging into the unfeeling earth. I was grateful
for the physical pain; it made me focus on the task at hand and not on what
Charlie's death signified: my complete isolation.

The cemeteries had been filled to capacity for a while, long before Charlie fell ill.
We were one of the last—if not the last—families hit. They'd started piling bodies
in mass graves, shoveling lye on top, the survivors wearing facemasks as they
worked. Grim was the mood that hung heavy in the air. I couldn't remember the
last time I'd heard anyone laugh, or even seen anyone smile.

As Charlie was dying, he had tried though. He told corny jokes. "Smile for me,
baby girl," he'd said as he shivered, and I'd tried so hard to give him what he
needed, but my face was stiff, my muscles already forgetting what once had felt
so natural. It's maybe his last wish, I admonished myself. Just fucking smile,
already. But my heart felt heavy; my cheeks were concrete.

I thought of all this, as I did almost every day, as I walked along the main road.
"Hello?" I called to the sky. "I'm Bella Swan!" I shouted. "I am alive!" I wanted to
hear my voice bounce off something; even an echo would have been a comfort.
But it was always nothing answering me back.

I knew what remained of Forks so well that I could have walked around with my
eyes closed. Fifty-two steps to get to the end of the driveway. Two thousand and
forty-seven steps to the center of town. I counted. Every day, I counted, because
what else was there to do? Sometimes I'd go to the park and lie on a park bench.
I didn't want to lie on the grass, because I didn't know if there were bodies
decomposing below me. I'd lie on a park bench and look at the sky, try to see my
future in the clouds. I remembered being a kid and imagining heaven in the sky.

I wasn't sure what I believed these days.

Today I stretched out on my favorite bench, the one with the clearest view of the
firmament, and looked at the clouds drifting by, lazily evolving in the wind.
Sometimes the clouds looked like faces. Sometimes I could have sworn I saw
people I remembered. I talked to them as if they could hear me. Today there was
a cloud that looked like Mike Newton, a popular kid from my class. "Hi, Mike," I
said to the cloud. "Do you remember me? What's new? What colleges do you
think you'll be applying to?"

The cloud mutated, no longer looking remotely human. "Goodbye, Mike," I said.
"It was nice talking to you. Thanks for stopping by."

I hadn't always talked to myself, not at the beginning. For so long I was in shock,
walking around like a zombie. How long had I remained silent? I used to mark the
days in a calendar, take a chunky crayon like we did in kindergarten and X out
the days, but then the calendar ran out, and no one was alive to make new ones.
It was after the calendar ran out of days and my thoughts grew sluggish and
strange, that I dreamed I had forgotten how to speak, was devolving, turning
back into a primate. That morning I vowed I would speak aloud, and as much as I
could, no matter how silly I felt.

And the strange thing was, it was hard at first. I had forgotten how to form
words; my mouth felt rusty from disuse and neglect. I started reading books out
loud to myself. Sometimes I would take a book out to the backyard and read to
Charlie. And then I started talking to myself, imagining conversations with others.

I watched the clouds transform above my head and looked for more familiar
faces, but today wasn't a good day. Every cloud now resembled an inkblot. I
giggled to myself, thinking I must be losing my mind if ambiguous shapes were
beginning to resemble only other ambiguous shapes. Absentmindedly I picked at
the peeling paint on the bench.

I suddenly felt a strange urge to run, to run for all I was worth. I sprinted around
the perimeter of the park, my hair trailing behind me. I was breathing hard and
sweating, and it felt good. I whooped and hollered and ran until my lungs burned.
There was a statue in the center of the park, some military hero on a horse. I
tried to remember what I'd once read about the legs of the horse—which position
meant the man had died in battle? I scrunched my face up, trying to wring the
memory out of my brain. My legs felt twitchy from stopping, so I ran again, did

one more lap. I jogged toward the statue with my eyes closed, 289 steps from
the edge of the park to the statue, but on step 276 I tripped over … something,
something I was fairly sure hadn't been there five minutes ago. My breath caught
in my throat, and I let out a shriek while windmilling my arms and trying to
regain my balance. I opened my eyes just as I slammed my foot down on
something hard. I thought the statue of the man on the horse had toppled over,
until I looked up and saw the man and horse, just as they'd been the last time I'd
checked.

I must be dreaming, I thought, because nothing ever changed. I was afraid to
look down to see where my foot had landed. Why? There would be nothing that
could be worse than what had already happened to me. "Don't be childish, Bella,"
I said, my cheeks still flushed from running. "It's nothing."

I let my gaze drift down and clapped my hands over my mouth when I saw the
body, so motionless it may have been a statue. He—it—whatever—was beautiful,
like an angel fallen from heaven. I knelt down, pretty certain now that I was
dreaming, and I traced the lines of his face, cool and perfect and still. I looked up
to the skies to figure out how he'd gotten here. I gazed above me and murmured,
"Where did you come from?"

Something cold gripped my arm like a vise, and I screamed. I tried to pull my
hand away but couldn't. I looked down, and the statue had moved, had encircled
my wrist with a stone finger and thumb. I was definitely dreaming. If this were a
dream, I needn't be afraid. So I tried to still my breath and make sense of the
situation. You're safe, you're safe, you're safe, I reminded myself. Nothing can
harm you now, in your dreams or in waking.

But then, the statue talked to me. His eyes remained closed, but I saw his mouth
move. I definitely saw the jaw tense, the lips form words I could barely hear.

"Isabella," the statue whispered, "is that really you?"

I was so used to speaking to things and not hearing anything back that I was
struck silent.

"How can you still be alive?" he said.

I swallowed a few times, afraid I'd finally gone completely crazy. "Do I know
you?" I finally asked.

"Isabella Swan," he said with effort, eyes still closed, and then he was silent
again, his fingers still shackling my wrist in its icy grasp.

Chapter 4: Rapacious

"Wake up, wake up, wake up!" I yelled, not so much to the statue but to myself.
I took my free hand and slapped my cheek again and again. "Wake the fuck up!"
I wanted out of this dream.

My other hand was going numb from the icy fingers on my wrist—I wasn't sure if
it was because the stony fingers were cutting off my circulation or because of the

coldness of the hand itself. Maybe both. I tried to pry the fingers off, but they
formed an unbreakable circle. It was as if the statue had been cast around me. I
looked at the beautiful, horrible mouth again. The lips were closed, inanimate—
had they really spoken? Had I just imagined they had said my name?

The body wasn't moving—it couldn't be alive. I used my free hand to feel for a
pulse, but why would a statue have a pulse? "Speak again," I said tentatively,
unsure if I was hoping for silence or for speech. Speech would mean I was crazy;
silence would mean I was alone, as always. Which was worse?

I found myself thinking of that movie with Jimmy Stewart and the giant rabbit
that only he could see. Was it so bad being crazy? Would I rather be sane and
alone? When you were the last person on earth, was sanity even relevant? I
thought of the last few months, the days running into each other, my carefully
regimented routine, eating everything cold out of cans, talking to the clouds … I
looked at the statue that I wasn't sure had called my name. The decision was
easy.

I chose insanity.

"Hey," I said, shaking the statue by the shoulder. "Wake up."

He didn't move.

"Jesus, at least let me the fuck go," I said. My hand was turning white and red
and purple.

Silence and stillness.

I played a movie in my head, a montage of my last few months, of all the things I
had done that I hadn't believed myself capable of: burying my father, breaking
into people's houses while tiptoeing around mummified corpses, living with the
silence in my head, being utterly alone. I was stronger than I believed. And I
wasn't going to let some stone statue, alive or not, hold me prisoner.
"Godfuckingdammit, you are going to let go of my arm right now!" I yanked my
arm hard and made my hand as small as I could, imagining my flesh turning to
liquid and flowing through the gaps between the stone fingers.

It hurt a fuck of a lot, but I freed myself. My skin scraped against the rough, cold
fingers, an impossible stone fingernail digging into the back of my hand. It was
like a tiny X-Acto knife wound, precise and merciless, a surgeon's artful touch. I
hissed from the sudden pain and watched in wonder as the clean cut slowly filled
with blood, a tiny hidden spring. For some reason I was reminded of Tuck
Everlasting and the stack of pebbles hiding the spring of eternal life.

My blood was dark, startling red, and the air began to smell faintly metallic. In
the back of my head I wondered if I were anemic, if I had been getting enough
protein from all the canned meat product I'd been eating. I continued letting the
blood ooze out of the cut. I was so fascinated by the life flowing through and out
of my veins that I didn't notice at first that the statue had started to stir. But
then there was too much movement in my peripheral vision, and I focused again
on the mysterious sculpture.

I didn't try to make sense of what I saw: the coal-black eyes flying open, the
mouth opening slightly. I thought I heard a groan. The eyes, the eyes were wild,
vicious. The gaze flew to my hand, so desperate, so full of desire that my skin felt
on fire.

"Please," I thought I heard the statue whisper, but the voice was dry and hollow,
desiccated. My mouth felt dry just listening to him, my skin itchy like it would be
from dry radiator heat in the winters, back when we had winters and radiators.

"What do you need?" I asked.

"Please," the statue said again.

He'd come to life again after I'd been cut. Could he feel my pain? Or was it the
smell of the fresh blood? I waved my hand near his face, and when I looked in his
eyes, I knew he could easily kill me.

"No," he gasped. "Take it away." He spoke with such surprising force that I jerked
my hand away, and one fat, perfect drop of blood fell onto his lip. His tongue
darted out to taste it, and his eyes closed again. His forehead wrinkled, and I
noticed his hands were clenched into fists. He grasped the grass in handfuls as if
wishing the blades of grass would tether him to the ground. His whole body
shook; it seemed as if he were fighting something in himself. "I … won't … harm
you, Isabella Swan," he said through gritted teeth, purging himself of each word
as if he'd swallowed a bottle of ipecac.

I didn't know what possessed me, but I softly asked, "Do you need the blood?"

"Don't offer what you can't provide," he said, grinding his teeth and squeezing his
eyes shut.

"I'm still bleeding," I shrugged, pinching together the loose skin on either side of
the cut. A few more drops beaded up. "Here," I said, tipping my hand over his
mouth and letting the drops fall in, one, two, three. He moaned, sliding his
tongue inside his mouth, and suddenly I felt like Lucy Pevensie with her cordial of
fire-flower juice. His eyes began to flutter open, and his fingers twitched.

"Can you … sit up?" I asked.

"I can try," he said weakly.

I stood up and held his hands, leaning back with all my weight. He felt like
marble, living marble, if ever there was such a thing. His body creaked to sitting
position, and I barely noticed that his firm grip had bruised both of my hands.

"Thank you," he said.

"What did I do?" My cut was already starting to clot. I wondered if the clean
incision would leave a scar.

"Haven't … eaten … in so long," he gasped. "No food anywhere."

I thought of the basement walls lined floor to ceiling with cans. "There's food at
my house," I offered.

"Can't eat that," he said.

"Can't or won't? Don't be proud or chivalrous. I'm offering you food. I'll share."

"Can't," he said again. His eyes flicked over again to the back of my hand, the
cut.

It all clicked. "You can drink only blood, can't you?"

He didn't answer, but from the way his eyes followed my hand, I knew it was
true. His situation was far worse than mine. As far as I knew, I was the only
person alive. I noticed how gaunt he looked, how his cold skin clung to the bone,
how sharp his cheekbones appeared, how deep the hollows of his eyes.

"Haven't had … human blood in so long," he whispered hoarsely.

I had chosen insanity, so I did not feel too foolish when I asked, "Are you a
vampire?"

His eyes and mouth opened wide in shock, and after a few moments of staring at
me, he simply nodded.

"Are you the only one left?"

He swallowed a few times, his eyes gazing at something far away, long buried in
his memory. "Yes, I think I am."

"Are you real?" I immediately shook my head and said, "No, don't answer that. It
doesn't matter." I crouched back down next to him.

We sat quietly, and I watched my skin knit back together. "Can you stand, do you
think?" I asked.

"I used up the last of my energy to find you, Isabella Swan. Your blood revived
me, but I'll need more to move, and I can't ask you for that."

"Why can't you?"

He laughed sharply. "Don't you have any sense of self-preservation? Do you even
know what you are offering?"

"Fuck my self-preservation," I said. "Self-preservation means I spend what's left
of my life completely alone. What good does that do me?"

Impetuously I grabbed his cold hand and dug his fingernail across my hand
again, reopening the wound. "Drink," I ordered, and I held my hand to his lips,
his cold, lifeless lips.

He began to suck, his animal side taking over, and I heard him swallow a few
times before he forced himself to stop, spitting out the blood in his mouth and
wiping his lips with the back of his hand. "No," he said firmly. "I won't."

I looked where he'd spat, and my blood was diluted, pinkish. It reminded me of
children's aspirin. Tentatively I reached out a hand to touch his side. I could feel
every rib. I could see his hipbones jutting above his pants, which were so worn
they must have once fit perfectly, maybe been his favorite pair. And now they
hung off him like an old snakeskin.

"It'll kill you," he said. "And it will kill me too."

"I don't understand," I said. "Why will it kill you? Vampires drink blood. That's
what they do. Or is there something I don't know?"

"The virus," he said. "Tainted blood … that's why I'm alone. I was the only one
who had the strength not to feed. We … can't die of starvation."

"I'm the only one alive," I said. "I've been the only one for a while. I think … I
think the virus would have gotten me by now."

I shoved my hands between my knees and stared at my stretched-out legs. I
could feel his gaze sweep over me.

"You are a curiosity, Isabella Swan," he said finally, slowly bringing himself to
standing. He held out a hand to help me up.

"Why do you know my name?" I asked, allowing him to pull me upright, although
I needed no help.

His eyes grew darker. "It is right that you shouldn't remember me. You never
should have known me. It was selfish for me to come back, but … I had to come
say goodbye."

We began to walk arm in arm, my routine already broken. I turned around and
started back for the house, several hours before I usually returned. The sun
shone weakly in our faces, and I did not turn around to see if one shadow or two
were cast behind me, attached to my heels, following me home across the barren
earth.

Chapter 5: Fragments

His arm felt like an iron rod wrapped in fabric. I could tell he was unbreakable
and strong, but he still seemed so frail, wasted away. I was reminded of Hansel
and Gretel, how Hansel would stick a chicken bone out of the cage bars whenever
the nearsighted witch asked to see his fingers to see if he were fat enough to eat.

"It's not very far," I said, glancing to see where we were. "Just about eight
hundred steps more."

"Is that a rough estimate?" he asked, curious.

I blushed. "It's, um, actually pretty accurate."

"You counted?"

"I've been here a long time. Counting helps. Counting is better than silence."

I used my peripheral vision to look at his face, to try to remember him. Why did
he know my name? Was it just the hunger in his eyes, how he was just skin on
bone that made me unable to recognize him? If he were at a healthy weight,
would I remember?

"What are you thinking, Isabella?" he asked so quietly that I wasn't certain I
hadn't just imagined it.

I kept my eyes on my feet as I counted steps backwards from eight hundred.
"Nothing … I mean … you know me, and you came to say goodbye, but I don't
know who you are. I'm sorry. Should I know you?"

"You shouldn't," he said with such sadness that I wanted to stop and lie down in
the middle of the road and cry, cry as I hadn't really let myself yet, because if I
cried as much as I wanted, I'd never be able to stop. No, I only let out some
tears, just enough so I wouldn't drown. Just enough to keep the levies from
breaking.

I didn't know him, and he already filled me with such a feeling of loss.

"Have we met?" I asked, swallowing back the lump in my throat and trying to
shake myself of the urge to lie in the road and melt into tears.

"Do you remember your first day of school here, Isabella?"

I closed my eyes as we walked (696, 695, 694, I counted to myself) and tried to
remember that other life, the life before. I'd just moved here to be with Charlie,
after living with my mom (Don't think of her; don't think of Mom, I thought,
gripping more tightly to the stranger's bony, iron arm) for years. I remembered
the boys falling all over themselves to help me get to classes, my embarrassment
at their attention, my wish to disappear. 654, 653, 652 …

Little shards of memory came back at me, and I began to piece them together in
my head like a stained glass window. Lunch in the cafeteria that smelled like
Lysol, sour milk, and tater tots. I was convinced that cafeterias always smelled
the same everywhere.

603, 602, 601 …

The girls were sizing me up, wondering if I would be competition for the boys
they'd already claimed as their own. They took in my lack of makeup, my barely
brushed hair, tried to guess my cup size from my loose-fitting top …

"I remember a lot of it," I said.

Jessica and Angela had decided I wouldn't be a threat, so they helped me find my
classes and told me all the gossip about the teachers—which one was a closet
alcoholic, which one was rumored to have had an "inappropriate" relationship
with a long-gone student when she was only a sophomore.

"I remember the first time I saw you," he said, leaning against me, breathing
laboriously. I slowed my steps, feeling his strength waning. 595, 594, 593 …

Sitting down in English while everyone else was standing and chatting, wishing I
could be invisible, wondering if this place would ever feel like home …

"When was that?" I asked, my eyes still closed, my mind still counting down. I
was trying to fit this strange creature into my memory of that day. Was he by my
locker? Standing near the water fountain? In P.E. class? Nothing seemed right. As
if he were a paper doll, I moved him from place to place in my mental image of
the school. He didn't fit anywhere.

He said just one word, "Biology."

Biology. Mr. Banner. The room that smelled of formaldehyde and had that plaster
skeleton dressed appropriately for the seasons. On my first day, it was wearing a
Mariner's jersey.

"You were in biology with me?" I asked, frowning. I didn't remember.

"I sat next to you."

"Did you?" That didn't seem right. I was the only one who had no lab partner. I
sat by myself. It was just me at that lab table. 537, 536, 535 …

He coughed. "I'm afraid … I wasn't very kind to you."

I opened my eyes and shook my head. "You were never there. I sat alone. I sat
alone all year."

"You sat alone because of me."

"You must be mistaken." I didn't know why I was being so stubborn about this.
Maybe it was because if this memory was faulty, then I couldn't believe anything
that I remembered. It would mean my mind was not reliable, and somehow
losing the past was as scary as losing my future—maybe even scarier. I dropped
his arm and ran ahead of him, my counting growing faster in my head. I counted
down by fives.

At first, he tried to keep up with me, but then he stopped walking. He stood there
with shoulders slumped, head bowed. His eyes were squeezed shut in … pain?
Guilt?

"Isabella," he said finally, and he raised his hand to my cheek haltingly. His hand
hovered near my face, and I wondered if he would actually touch me. It
trembled, and I could see each tendon of the skeletal hand. It would have been
terrifying if his face hadn't been so pitiable.

I couldn't bear to watch anymore, so I closed my eyes. There was silence, just
my breathing and the beating of my heart. And then a feather's touch, cold
fingertips on my cheek, and like a flash, there was a new memory, so sharp it cut
into my brain like a scalpel.

There was only one seat available in the room, and there was a boy sitting there,
a boy so beautiful he was almost unreal. Mr. Banner pointed to the seat and
invited me to sit after handing me a textbook. I shuffled to the table, book
clutched to my chest, palms sweating. "Hi," I said shyly, not making eye contact.
He shifted away from me as if I smelled bad, as if he couldn't stand the fact that I
had to share the bench with him.

As if he hated me, without even knowing my name.

He leapt from his seat as if it were on fire, and he ran to Mr. Banner, talking low
in his ear. Mr. Banner nodded, and the boy ran out the room. I could hear his
footsteps in the hallway, fast and frightened, eventually fading into nothing,
blending with the ticking of the second hand of the large clock at the front of the
classroom. My eyes felt hot; my vision blurred. My head bent, tears dropped
straight onto the worn cover of the biology textbook. I didn't wipe them away.
The two fat tears sat on the cover, acting like tiny magnifying glasses, until they
were absorbed, buckling the paper.

"How was your first day, kid?" Charlie asked when I slammed the front door shut,
my whole body feeling numb.

I shrugged. "Okay, I guess."

He took one look at my face and asked, "How'd you like ice cream sundaes for
dinner?"

I dreaded the next day of school, but when I got to biology, the seat was empty.
I was too ashamed to ask my new schoolmates if they knew about the beautiful
boy who was gone.

I decided then that I had made him up. Just like that. It was a choice. When I
saw the warped cover of my biology textbook, I created a memory: a water

bottle sweating with condensation, carelessly placed on top of the book. This is
what happened. This is all that could have happened.

"You're not real," I said firmly. "You never existed."

"I did. I do," he said.

"No," I said, holding my head in my hands.

"Open your eyes, Isabella."

"No."

"How many steps, Isabella?"

I whispered, "Five hundred seventeen."

"Take me," he said, placing his hand my arm. "I'll count with you."

"Five hundred sixteen, five hundred fifteen," he murmured in unison with me as
we began to walk again, in a voice so hollow it could have been my own echoing
in my head.

And we walked, making no conversation, only counting backwards, until I could
see my house, the door still swinging a little in the wind.

Ten, nine, eight …

What happened when he walked through my door?

What happened at zero?

Chapter 6: Honest

As we both counted down to zero, we crossed over the threshold, the two of us,
arm in arm. I stopped counting. I didn't like counting into negative numbers.
Negative numbers made me think about absence, void, vacuums, and the end of
the world. Zero was where things stopped naturally. I could still handle zero.

I was practically carrying, rather than leading, him into the house. "Want to sit
down?" I asked, depositing him on the couch. He sank down into the dusty
cushions, wearily slumping flat onto his back. It struck me that this was the first
time since Charlie died that anyone else had been in the house. I wanted to play
hostess. I wanted to treat this stranger as a guest.

"Can I fetch you anything?" I asked stupidly. He just shook his head, closing his
eyes. He looked exhausted. "Hold on a second," I said, as if he had the energy to
dash away before I got back. I walked up the stairs and changed into a slightly
dressier top. Something I would have worn on picture day, maybe. The top hung
loosely, slipping off one bony shoulder. Had I lost that much weight? I brushed
my hair, wistfully remembering how I'd use this hairbrush to ease out the tangles
in my hair before school … before. I looked at my reflection in my dresser mirror.

I was paler, thinner, but there was still a rosy tint to my cheeks. There was still
blood within me, pumping and carrying oxygen, giving life.

Giving life.

I descended the stairs and found him exactly as I'd left him on the couch. He had
his arm draped over his face, shielding himself from the faint light that filtered
through the dirty windowpanes. "I'm back," I announced as I sat in the recliner
opposite him. Charlie's chair.

"Did you go somewhere?" he asked faintly.

His disinterest cut deeply into me, and, unbidden, another flash of that look of
hatred on his face from my long-buried memory resurfaced. My face burned with
shame. Shame? What do I have to be ashamed of?

"Why did you do it?" I demanded coolly from Charlie's chair. I sat cross-legged
and rocked back and forth as I waited for his answer.

"What?"

"Why did you leave? You were there, right? My first day of school? You were
real?"

"Yes, I was real. Yes, I was there."

"So why did you do it?" I started to rock harder, hearing the springs creak and
complain beneath me.

He wouldn't look at me, wouldn't remove his arm from across his eyes.

"What was wrong with me? What had I ever done to you?" I rocked furiously.
Squeak. Squeak. Squeak. I kept waiting for an answer, but he was still as a
statue.

"For fuck's sake, say something." I pounded my fists on the padded recliner
armrests, sending up a cloud of dust. I remembered reading somewhere that
75% of dust was made of dead skin cells. Was any part of Charlie still in this dust
cloud? I tried to catch particles, desperately wanting to hold a part of him in my
hand again.

The figure on the couch finally stirred. I could hear him swallow from across the
room, and I imagined his throat as dry as sand. My throat felt parched in
sympathy. I thought longingly of the jug of rainwater in the kitchen, but I wasn't
getting up until I had answers. "Well?"

"It's not so easy, Isabella," he said. "It's … I'm not proud of what I did. But I kept
you alive."

"You kept me alive?" The buried shame washed over me in waves, and I
remembered how I'd come home from school and re-imagine my first day, force
the new, altered memory to become the truth. There had never been a beautiful
boy sitting next to me in class. He was never there. He ran away when he saw
me. He was never there. Every night I'd repeat it to myself, my eyes closed,
picturing the biology room, the lab stool next to me empty. I meditated on the
words and the doctored image until I'd worn grooves into my neural pathways,
until the memory stuck, until I believed it was real. Now that he was in front of
me, I was furious that he'd so casually wrecked my first days in Forks. How many
nights had I blamed myself? If only you were prettier. If only you weren't you. It

had been unbearable. It was easier to try to fool myself into thinking I'd dreamed
it.

"Alice—my sister, she can see things, the future. I mean, she could see things,"
he said, his eyes still closed. "She warned me before we went to school today
that I was at a crossroads. 'Be careful,' she said. 'Change is coming.'"

"And?" My rocking had slowed, but my fingers twitched, my body humming with
restless energy. "Was she right?"

"Her visions, they are—were—only one facet of the possible future, if you can
imagine the future like a many-sided jewel."

I didn't ever imagine the future, but if I had to, I wouldn't picture a jewel. The
future was more like the line of the horizon in a desert, extending into infinity,
unchanging and hopeless.

"So," he continued, "I took it with a grain of salt, as I always did. But then you
walked into class, and …" He stopped, somehow managing to be even stiller than
he was a moment earlier.

We sat in silence, and I willed him to speak, but he did not budge.

"What?" I asked. "What happened next?"

"I wanted to … I almost did … kill you right there."

My blood ran cold, and I felt the same way I had the first time I was face to face
with a corpse in the street, the flies gathered in its still-moist eyes. "You …
wanted me dead?" I asked in a tiny voice, and I had trouble choking back tears.
"But why? What's wrong with me?"

"Wrong with you?" He laughed weakly. "Isabella, I'm a vampire. I'm a demon—
it's my nature."

"But you didn't want to kill anyone else. Just me," I said, picking at a loose
thread on the armrest.

"Over the years I'd learned to control my bloodlust. But something about you …
Alice was right. I wanted to feel your bones snap under me, feel the warm gush
of blood as I tore into your flesh. I'd never felt so out of control in my life."

I shivered, but I couldn't explain the sudden warmth I felt knowing that he'd
wanted to … consume me. Me, out of all the others.

"I ran away, and my family came with me. I knew I couldn't stay near you,
because I would kill you. I controlled myself for those moments when you were
near enough for me to twist your head, kill you quickly … but how would I be the
next day? Or the next? I knew I couldn't stay."

"So why did you come back?" I just noticed I had stopped moving, the only
motion my chest rising and falling with my breath.

"I figured you were dead, like the rest. And I wanted to say goodbye, and to
apologize. But I also …"

He was rather infuriating, the way he'd trail off just as things got interesting.
"What?" I asked through gritted teeth, trying to hide my irritation.

"I wanted to know if I'd still feel you, that raw desire, even as I walked over the
place where you were laid to rest." He still lay there with his arm over his eyes. I
wondered if it were easier for him to say these things with his eyes closed,
whether he was pretending he were alone.

"Where did you go? And how did you get here?"

"We went to join another coven in Alaska. Getting there was easier than coming
back—we packed up our cars and belongings, and it took only a day. Coming
back …" he shook his head a tiny bit under his arm. "I walked the whole way,
stopping to rest only when my legs had no more strength. I thought I'd die
coming back. I prayed I'd die coming back, but only after I found you. If I found
your grave, felt that stirring inside me one last time, I'd be all right with slipping
away forever, although I didn't know how to die."

I asked him perhaps the simplest question of them all. "Who are you?"

He removed his arm from his face finally, and sat up with great effort. Wearily he
opened his eyes. "My name is Edward Cullen, and I am the last of my kind."

"Hello, Edward," I said, getting out of the recliner, sending it rocking slowly, as if
Charlie were sitting there still. "Let's do this right. Let's start again."

I held out my hand. "I'm Isabella Swan, but everyone calls me Bella. I'm also the
last of my kind."

He took my hand in his cold, powdery one, and squeezed it weakly. "It's a
pleasure to meet you, Bella."

"And you, Edward," I said, shaking his hand back. Despite his weak grip, it was
like squeezing a stone.

"Your hand is warm," he said, closing his eyes again, drowning in the feeling.

"Don't," I said.

"Don't what?"

"Don't close your eyes. I want to see them."

He opened them slowly, as if it hurt him. I cupped his face in my hands and
studied his face, gazed into his inky black eyes. I could see the pale outline of my
face reflected back at me. His eyes were like the sky at midnight, the outside
light reflected off them glinting like stars set in the firmament.

"I remember when the sky looked like that," I murmured sadly. "I miss the
stars."

"The sun is a star," he pointed out.

"I suppose," I shrugged.

"It's dying too," he said.

"We all are. But not quickly enough." I'd been alone for so long, and I'd wanted
to join everyone who was gone. But the truth was, I was too afraid to die on my
own. And I knew Charlie wanted me to live as long as I could. I thought of his
stocking up our house with enough food for years. It seemed like spitting in his
face if I tossed my life away. I lived for him.

And sitting next to this beautiful boy who I had not merely imagined, I thought
that maybe, maybe now I could live for someone else too.

Chapter 7: Comfort

"When did the stars die?" I asked. I could feel Edward shrug from where he sat
next to me.

"The stars are—were—so far away that by the time you see their light, it's been
at least several years," he said. "The nearest star, after the sun, was Proxima
Centauri, and it would take about four years for the light to reach us from there.
So when Proxima Centauri died, it had already happened four years ago. The
other stars, they're even farther away. Some of them hundreds of thousands of
years away."

"They might have been dying before we were born."

"They might have already died before the earth was formed," he said.

"And all this time, I was living my life, and I never knew," I said, shivering and
drawing my knees to my chest. "The world was always dying, and I worried that
no one would ask me to prom." And I began to cry.

I felt his cold, trembling hand brush against my cheek, catching one tear. "Even
your tears are warm," he said. "Why are you crying?"

"I'm just wondering why I was born, if this is how everything was going to end.
Why bring me into this world where I'd see nothing but everyone I love die in
front of me, the end of civilization, the end of humanity, for god's sake? Why me?
Why now? Why couldn't I have been born in the '20s or something? Flappers,
Prohibition … seemed like good times." I laughed pitifully through my tears,
gamely trying to make a joke.

"The '20s were a little lame," said Edward.

Edward. He had a name. And he was real. And he was here, with me.

"Why?" I sniffled, wiping my face on my sleeve.

"There was a lot more shit in the streets, for one thing, and then you had the
Great Depression, and then once we got out of that, World War II—basically life
has always kind of sucked."

"Is that a pun? Like, a vampire pun?" I asked, still wiping my face.

"Uh, no. Why?"

"Because I hate puns."

He laughed weakly, wrapping his arms around his middle. It seemed even that
amount of activity had tapped his diminished store of energy.

"What happened to the vampires?" I asked suddenly.

"Forgive me," he said, slumping over on the couch. "I can't sit up any longer."

I stood and helped put his legs up. I sat on the floor by him, so I could still look
into his obsidian eyes. "Do you want a blanket?" I asked.

"I don't get cold," he said.

"You need a blanket," I decided, ignoring him. I leapt up to get an old afghan
from the wicker basket by the fireplace. I tucked him in, ignoring his weak
protestations. He looked better to me, even if it were only an illusion. It made me
feel better to see him look as though he were being cared for.

"You should know," he began, "that my family—we weren't like the other
vampires. We didn't feed off of humans, only animals. There weren't that many
who are like us. When the virus began to infect the humans, the vampires didn't
think anything of it, didn't change their hunting or feeding patterns." His
breathing was ragged, as if telling the story were as taxing as running a
marathon.

"Something happened, and it happened slowly. The vampires who fed off infected
humans also got a version of the disease. They grew ill and died. It wasn't
communicable from vampire to vampire, only through infected blood."

"But you—you said your family didn't feed from humans."

He looked at me, waiting for me to make the connection.

After the initial scare, the schools reopened. Students were urged to stay home if
they felt the tiniest bit ill, and a lot of parents kept their kids at home anyway, for
fear that they'd get sick. Tyler Crowley's mom forced him to go to school no
matter what—his brother had dropped out of high school years ago, and she was
determined to see at least one of her children graduate. "What's a little
sickness?" he'd say, imitating her domineering voice. "No sniffle is going to keep
my baby from getting into college. If you stay home, I'll kill you myself."

We'd laughed at the time, so desperate for joy as our classes grew smaller and
smaller as people became ill, died, or simply moved away, hoping somehow to
outrun the illness. "Your mom is pretty fucking scary," we'd agreed, and Tyler
nodded his head vigorously.

We didn't notice then how red his eyes were, or the sweat that had begun to
bead on his forehead. We were hanging out during lunch in the biology lab,
playing with the guinea pigs, Darwin and Mendel.

Tyler was holding Darwin when he sneezed. We all backed away from him,
instinctively putting our arms in front of our faces.

"Guys, relax," he said. "It's just allergies. These fuckers always make me
sneeze."

"Okay," we said, but we still kept our distance.

The next day, Darwin was dead. The day after that, Mendel, who shared Darwin's
cage, was dead too. By the end of the week, so was Tyler. Guess his mom
wouldn't have to kill him after all for missing school.

"The animals," I murmured. "The virus spread from human to animal. And then …
did it go from animal to vampire, just like it had from human to vampire?"

Edward nodded with great effort. "Carlisle—I thought of him as my father—he
was trained in medicine, and he didn't see this coming. He thought we were safe
because we'd only heard of traditional vampires falling ill. Alice, well, we don't

know why her visions didn't warn us—but maybe it was because no one had
made a decision that caused the animals to die. She couldn't read into the intent
of viruses that had decided to mutate. By the time Carlisle realized what was
happening, he and his wife, my second mother, kind, beautiful Esme, were
already too ill, and we all know that there's no cure for the virus, no matter
who—or what—it strikes."

"What happened to Alice?"

"She was already infected by the time Carlisle had figured it out. She fought so
hard—for a while we thought she was the exception, that she'd make it. Jasper—
her mate, and my brother—was by her constantly. I almost think his love kept
her alive."

"And then?" I said in a hushed voice.

"Jasper was startled by a noise outside. He dropped her hand in surprise. As soon
as their skin-to-skin connection was lost, she slipped away. It happened in the
blink of an eye, maybe even faster. Jasper was beside himself, naturally. He …
built Alice a great funeral pyre, and then he jumped into the flames with her body
in his arms. I tried to pull him out, but he begged me to let him go."

My heart broke for these souls I'd never known. "Were there others? In your
family, I mean?"

He sighed, and it seemed he was trying to force his eyes to stay open because I'd
asked him to. Maybe he wanted to shut them, to stop the memories from coming.

"You don't have to keep your eyes open if you're only doing it for me," I said.

"Thank you." And the obsidian night was veiled again. He swallowed a few times
before he continued. "I had another sister—Rosalie—and another brother,
Emmett. We were all that were left, along with the coven in Alaska. We knew the
animals were no longer safe. I don't know if the other covens like ours had
figured it out."

He sighed, and it was my turn to touch his cheek with a trembling hand. "So
warm," he said, leaning into my palm. I bit my lip to keep from crying, worrying
I'd offend him by showing sorrow for his loved ones I'd never even met.

"We knew if we kept feeding, we would die, because we couldn't tell which
animals were well and which ones weren't. The virus could be dormant for days
before the illness presented in the animals, especially the bigger ones. I didn't
feed. Emmett didn't mind. He liked taking risks. He said he'd never gotten to play
Russian roulette as a human, and this was the next best thing. You know, gallows
humor."

"It's the only way you can survive," I murmured, wondering how his cheek could
feel so solid yet loose and fragile all at once.

"Emmett was lucky the first few times, but then he …" Edward squeezed his eyes
tighter. He didn't need to finish that part of the story.

"And the rest of your family?" I asked gently, hoping I wasn't causing him too
much pain.

"After Emmett died, Rosalie went looking for an animal she knew was infected.
She was his mate, you see. She didn't want to live without him. It didn't take
long. And the other coven, they tried not to feed, knowing it would mean their

death. But they simply grew too hungry to care anymore. 'What kind of living is
this?' they said, leaving for what would be their last hunt, even as I begged them
not to go. And then I was the only one left."

"And why were you strong enough to resist? How could you live that long without
eating?"

"Because of you, Bella. I had to come back to see you, to say goodbye and to
apologize. I'd imagined I'd be apologizing to your grave. I didn't expect to find
you alive."

"Can you die of starvation?"

"No. I only wish that I could. It would be easier. I was wondering how I was
going to die once I'd said goodbye to you, since there are no more animals, sick
or well."

"But I'm alive," I said.

"Yes, I wasn't expecting that."

"So you don't want to die now, do you?"

"I … don't."

"So it doesn't matter," I said. "It doesn't matter that there's no way for you to
die, because I'm here, and I'm alive, and I'm not alone anymore." I surprised
myself by bursting into tears at the thought. "I'm not alone anymore," I
repeated, sobbing.

"Hush, don't cry. Don't cry," he said, trying to reach for me but not being able to
free himself of the blanket.

"No, I'm happy for the first time in a long while. I'm happy that I'm not alone." I
roughly brushed my tears away and wondered if I could really ask him what I was
thinking.

He was studying my face. "You look like you're trying to figure something out."

Shyly, I looked away, unable to make eye contact as I made my request. "It's …
it's just been so long since anyone's hugged me. Sometimes I wrap my arms
around myself really tightly and try to remember how hard my mom squeezed
me, what rhythm she patted my back at when she was proud of me, what rhythm
when I was sad. There were different rhythms, see, but I can't remember them
all, not for certain anyway." I didn't tell him about the pillow upstairs that I'd
dressed in Charlie's clothes, or how I'd drape an empty sleeve over me when the
nights were too lonely to bear.

"Aren't you afraid of me?" he asked in a voice so quiet I wasn't sure if I'd only
imagined that he'd spoken.

"Why should I be?" I asked defiantly. "The worst has already happened. All my
nightmares have come true. So what could happen to me now?"

"Then come here, Bella, for I am too weak to come to you."

I lifted up the blanket and slid next to his thin body on the wide, plush couch. "So
warm," he said again, and I drew his arms around me.

"I can see your pulse in your neck," he said.

"I'm sorry—should I cover it up? Is it too hard for you?"

"No—on the contrary, it gives me hope. There's still life here, and of all the
people in the world, it's you. You were the only one I prayed was still alive."

"Do vampires pray?" I asked, lulled almost to sleep from the pressure of his arms
and his voice in my ear.

"Some of us do," he said. "But our prayers are not usually answered."

We lay there under the afghan, my heart beating loudly enough for the two of us,
ticking like a clock counting down our last days.

Chapter 8: Willing

Having Edward around changed my routine, but it took time. After living the
same day over and over, and having the comfort of that routine, I found it hard
to break out of the patterns. If I didn't go through all the normal steps of my day,
I worried that I'd trigger something horrible to happen, even when I couldn't
imagine how life could possibly get worse. I would have thought I'd be happy for
the change, but it was terrifying, like being dropped in the middle of outer space
and not being able to see the edges of the universe—too much space, too much
freedom, too much unknown. I tried to do one different thing a day, slowly easing
myself out of my regimented schedule, letting it evolve slowly from single-celled
organism to multi-celled. My days moved at glacial pace from living in the ocean
to learning how to survive on land, from crawling to walking on fours, until they
were finally upright.

He would rest on the couch in the living room all day with his eyes closed. He told
me that vampires didn't sleep, but he could have fooled me. I would go on my
rounds, visit Charlie's bed in the middle of the night, but now I'd gotten into the
habit of sleeping a few hours at night on the couch with Edward, the strange
contrast of coldness behind and around me, and my own body heat trapped
under the blankets. It was sort of like swimming in the ocean, where every stroke
of my arms, kick of my legs, every wave that lifted me off my feet, could bring a
different temperature, pushing me into a sudden pocket of warmth, and then one
icy cold.

I remembered going to the beach long ago with Renee—we'd go to Florida for
winter break some years. She looked amazing in her two-piece, big floppy hat on
her head, dark sunglasses—like a Hollywood starlet. The skin on her stomach was
flat and toned despite having once been pregnant with me. "I have amazing
genes," she'd say if anyone asked. I had a one-piece with a floral pattern and a
series of butt ruffles, a look that works when you're nine years old.

I'd run from our spot on the sand and jump into the foamy waves, shrieking from
the cold and the startling snaking of seaweed around my stocky legs. I'd paddle
out to where I could still reach the bottom unless a big wave came by, floating up
and away right before the wave crashed behind me. From time to time I'd look
back to her, a tiny, bright dot on a sandy canvas. She'd wave back to me from
her blanket, and if I squinted, I could see her rubbing suntan oil on her skin, the
stuff that made her smell like a fruit smoothie.

I'd learned in science class about SPF, and I told her I didn't think that tanning oil
was good enough to protect her skin. She'd ruffle my hair and say, "Bella,
sweets, it's all about calculated risks. Plus I'm wearing a hat. My face is going to
be fine." I worried about her so much, waking up in the middle of the night and
fretting she'd get skin cancer and leave me motherless. I almost laughed now to
think of how insignificant my worries were then, how tiny in the grand scheme of
what could, and did, actually go wrong. Now I knew she'd been right all along—
what good would it have done to cover up head to toe, to slather herself with SPF
100, if the virus was going to take her in a few years anyway? At least she got to
stretch out in the sun and live the way she wanted to, not dictated by fear like
me. I wished I could have been more like her when I'd had the chance.

Live the way you want to.

How would I live now, live it to the fullest given the parameters in which I was
trapped? I sat on Charlie's recliner and watched Edward resting. He was weaker
every day, but he could not die. How horrible. I'd read to him, even though I
didn't know if he could hear me. "Are you listening?" I'd ask sometimes.

"I like to hear your voice," he'd say, moving his lips so slightly that I wasn't sure
if I'd imagined that he'd responded at all.

Every morning I read him the paper, the last paper, the same as I always began
my day—I incorporated him into my routines. I'd eat breakfast in the living room
with him, which was different, and I felt guilty for eating when he couldn't. But
then I'd remind myself that he'd asked me not to leave him, even if he couldn't
see me.

"I can hear your heart beat, even when my eyes are closed," he'd say. "As long
as your heart beats, I don't remember anything else."

I'd go outside and walk, looking for more provisions, looking at the sky and
hoping for rain. I remembered a time when I hated how wet and dreary Forks
was, but now I would welcome the frequent showers. The rest of my—our—days,
I would read to Edward as he rested, still, exhausted, starving.

We were finishing up The Grapes of Wrath, maybe not the cheeriest book to read
under our circumstances, but Edward said he'd never read any Steinbeck. I'd
rather have read East of Eden, but all the cheery family moments of the
Hamiltons made me miss Charlie too much. Somehow it was easier to handle the
steady stream of misery of The Grapes of Wrath. The overwhelming despair of
the Joads was almost a comfort. I felt less alone. I began reading the last scene,
with Rose of Sharon baring her breast and feeding the starving man, blushing a
little as I read to Edward.

"Strange ending," he said as I closed the book.

"But kind of beautiful, right?" I said, even though when I'd first read it for English
class, I'd been pretty weirded out by it. I must have been uncomfortable with the
idea of breastfeeding in general—I mean, jeez, I'd had trouble drinking milk if I
thought about it too much—but then breastfeeding an adult—a total stranger—
that added a whole new level of ick. Now though, the whole scene read
differently. I saw now that she gave the only thing she had, even after losing her
baby. She didn't let tragedy and sorrow and poverty and starvation overcome her
and make her ignore someone in need.

And in that moment, I knew what I had to do.

"I'm going out," I said, vaguely waving my hand.

"Okay," he said in a raspy voice. "Be safe."

I laughed. "What else is out there? There's nothing."

I retied the laces on my sneakers tightly and ran the mile and a half to the old
health clinic. I pulled my t-shirt over my nose and mouth, trying not to breathe
too deeply. So many had died here, the doctors coming to work every day even
when they were struck ill, because someone had to tend to the dying. What could
they do but make people comfortable, administering as much morphine or
Dilaudid as remained in their dwindling supplies? It was amazing; some of the
doctors had died on their feet, leaning against the wall just so. These bodies were
old, though, and not too pungent—by the end, no one could even make it to the
hospitals. I only hoped they still had supplies.

I wasn't sure what I was looking for, my memory from the school blood drive
hazy. I'd needed Charlie to sign the consent form since I wasn't seventeen yet. I
remembered getting my finger pricked to check for iron—that part had hurt the
worst of all. And they asked me so many embarrassing questions about what kind
of sex I may or may not have had. I knew my blood was clean, and anemia
wasn't an issue when I was the only one left alive. We could skip the formalities.
We, what we? I wondered. It's only me.

Iodine. I'd need iodine, and bandages, and the right kind of needle, and one of
those donation bags. Where would I find any of that? I wandered through the
dark halls until I found a supply closet. The door had been kicked down when the
rioting and looting began, and people had already taken all the painkillers. But no
one needed donation bags to get a fix. And iodine, well, what good would that do
anyone? I found bottles and bottles of it. I grabbed some bandages, iodine, a
handful of cotton balls, packages of gauze, and even found one of those rubber
strips they used to tie your arm up.

It was too dark inside the old building and far too dreary for me to attempt this
crazy thing in there. I walked outside, carefully stepping around the broken glass
of the entrance doors, and sat on a bench by the circular driveway leading up to
emergency care. The sun was out, pale and weak, but the light was still there. I
had no idea what I was doing, or if I would be brave enough. How would I even
find a vein?

I swabbed the inside of my arm, surprised at how cold the iodine felt on my skin.
I waited for the stuff to dry, watching it tint my inner arm a strange orangey
brown. I tied the rubber strip above my elbow as tightly as I could.

I could feel my pulse straining against the tie, beating time like a metronome,
like a watch. Funny, that. Watches worked only while they ticked, same as
people. No more ticking, no more life. It was as if my pulse were repeating, "I'm
alive! I'm alive!" Despite everything that had happened to the world, my heart
refused to stop beating, the stubborn little thing.

I felt around the crook of my elbow, trying to feel where the beating was the
strongest. I freed the sterile needle from its crinkly packaging, scared a little by
how thick it was. I gulped and shook my head, trying to dispel my nerves. God,
Charlie, whoever's out there, I prayed, guide my hand. Help me do this right. I
don't care how much it hurts.

I tapped the inside of my arm a few times, thinking that if drug addicts could do
this, I didn't need to be any sort of medical professional. And then I closed my
eyes and jabbed, hoping I wouldn't screw it up.

I didn't cry out even as the needle pinched and burned, but I waited a few
breaths until the throbbing calmed down before opening my eyes. The tubing
from the needle was filling with deep crimson, thick as tempera paint. It was
amazing to see, and I opened and closed my fist, recalling the instructions the
friendly nurse had given me in the school gym. I touched the tubing with my free
hand, amazed at how warm my blood was flowing through, the same
temperature as me. The bag began, slowly, to fill, and I thought of Rose of
Sharon and the starving man. "She looked up and across the barn, and her lips
came together and smiled mysteriously."

I cradled the bag in my lap as it filled, thinking of Edward lying under blankets on
the couch, and I smiled a little too. I cupped the bag in my free hand, enjoying
the heft of the bag in my palm. Surely this would help him.

I didn't know if I had a pint yet, but I got a piece of gauze out and put it on top of
the needle as I slid it out. I reclined slowly on the concrete bench, holding the
gauze tightly against my arm, trying to stop the blood. I raised my arm high into
the air above me as if I knew the answer to the question the sun seemed to be
asking me as it shone weakly, not warming my face.

Chapter 9: Restraint

I waited a while before sitting up. I counted nine hundred Mississippis—fifteen
minutes sounded about right for resting after losing a pint of blood, given
healthy, normal blood pressure. I tried to remember the last time my blood
pressure had been checked. When was my last physical? I never got sick—Renee
had even tried time and time again to expose me to chicken pox, but my immune
system was stubborn and refused to let that virus replicate. I never missed
school because of illness, and there was a drawer in the kitchen of my mom's
house (if it's even still standing, I thought to myself, wondering what Phoenix
looked like these days—if there was even a patch of dirt left that could be called
Phoenix) filled with my school attendance awards. I remembered a time when I
wanted to get sick, to get to stay home and be fed Jell-o and chicken soup and
ginger ale and saltines, to stay in pajamas all day and watch daytime game
shows and soaps and those boring small claims court programs. But I never got
sick. The greatest danger to my health was my own clumsiness.

As I held the gauze to my arm, I closed my eyes and tried to pretend the stone
bench was the padded table where I'd donated blood a few years ago. I breathed
deeply, trying to imagine the courtyard outside the heath center was the old
Forks High gymnasium, forcing myself to smell the memory of socks, sweat, and
hormones instead of the stagnant air tinged with death, decay, and a hint of
sulfur. I thought of the blood drive, how scared I'd been, and yet so proud that
those few moments of discomfort could save the lives of three people I'd never
get to meet. I remembered looking around the gym at the other kids in my class
with tubing taped to their arms, the coolers from the Red Cross. I remembered
the taste of watered-down grape juice and Lorna Doone shortbread cookies
they'd had at the recovery table, how strange the juice tasted after the grainy
sweetness of the shortbread. Juice and cookies never went together. Milk and
cookies made more sense, but they didn't give you milk after you gave blood. I
never thought I'd miss milk, but now I sorely wished we'd had milk with our

cookies at the recovery table, as if it would somehow make a difference to have
that taste memory instead of the juice and cookies clashing on my tongue.

I folded a new piece of gauze into fourths and taped it to the crook of my elbow
with a big band-aid and pushed myself up to sitting. I still had the bag of blood in
my hand. When I'd donated blood at the school blood drive, I remembered how
strangely sad I'd been when they'd whisked my donation bag away. I'd laughed
at myself for being so … well, sentimental didn't seem like the right word for it,
but it was something in that family. I'd been sad that a part of me was being
taken away, and I couldn't say goodbye. I didn't know why I wanted to feel the
heft of the bag in my arms, feel how warm it was, filled with the blood that had
been inside me moments before, carrying my oxygen, fighting off foreign bodies,
helping me live. I just wanted to touch the bag once, poke into its side with my
finger. It's just blood, Bella, I remembered telling myself. It's not like you just
gave up a baby or something. But I'd been sad all the same, even knowing that
my gift would save lives.

Not this time, though. I cradled the bag in my arms as if it were a tiny,
premature baby. "Hi there," I said to the bag. "Would you like to come home with
me? You would?" I said, answering for the bag. "All right, come here," I said,
holding the bag against my shoulder as if to burp the tiny, warm baby. "Baby's
warm and filled with such healthy blood," I cooed as I walked. I was aware that I
sounded crazy, but who was there to hear me?

The bag of blood cooled slowly, but I still felt let down as it slowly reached room
temperature as I neared the house. I idly tossed the bag from hand to hand,
which probably was speeding the cooling of the blood. Would Edward still drink it
if it weren't the right temperature? Would it be like eating cold leftovers? I used
to enjoy cold leftovers, back in the day when it seemed decadent to eat cold
pasta and chicken for breakfast. Now, though, all meals were cold leftovers. I
hated the feel of cold corned beef hash, the solidified fat melting slowly in my
mouth, feeling oddly gritty before dissolving on my tongue. What I wouldn't give
for a working microwave. Why hadn't anyone invented a windup microwave, like
my flashlight and radio?

Lost in these thoughts, I stopped watching where I was going and tripped over
my untied shoelaces. I went tumbling, and the bag of blood flew out of my hands
in slow motion. "No!" I shouted after it, and I tried to propel myself farther as I
tripped, stretching my body forward another few inches to try to break the bag's
fall with any part of my body. I fell face first into the dirt, but my outstretched
arms miraculously caught the bag. My chin got scraped pretty badly, but I didn't
think it was bleeding very much. I had a first aid kit in the house; I could clean
myself up there later. My left wrist ached tremendously, and it hurt to rotate.
Dumb, dumb, dumb, I told myself. The bag was probably strong enough to
survive a five-foot drop. But I couldn't take the chance. I could just see the bag
bursting, leaving a large red stain in the road. I couldn't bear the thought. If the
bag broke, I wouldn't be able to take out that much blood again for two months—
that is, if I wanted to be safe about this. I had to survive if he were to survive.

Wincing with pain, I got up slowly and walked the rest of the way back to the
house. I held the bag by its top in my right hand, my left arm hanging limply by
my side. I tapped my chin with a finger. The blood had already clotted. It was
more like a rug burn than anything else. Just a quick alcohol wipe would take
care of it when I got home.

I'd left the door open, and I hurried inside, not taking the time to take off my
shoes. "Edward?" I called. I didn't know why I called; he never moved from his
spot on the sofa. I supposed I didn't want to be rude and surprise him, although I

was also pretty sure he could hear my shuffling steps from quite a distance away,
especially if his hearing were good enough to hear my heart beat when we sat in
the same room.

"You're back," he said. "You were gone a long time."

"Was I?"

"You've cut yourself," he said, sniffing at the air.

"I'm fine," I shrugged. "Clumsy."

I wasn't quite sure what to do next, so I unceremoniously dumped the donation
bag onto his lap.

"What's that?" he asked, too weak to open his eyes.

"It's for you," I said, patting his shoulder as I sank to my knees on the floor by
the couch.

His hand came out from under the blanket and lightly touched the top of the bag.
"It's still warm," he said.

"Does it feel warm to you? It cooled down a lot."

He still hadn't opened his eyes.

"Well?" I asked.

"What is it?" he said, puzzled, running his hands on the plastic.

"It's blood," I said. "You need to drink it. You're too weak to do anything."

His brow furrowed. "Where … did you get this?"

"From my arm," I said as casually as I could.

"You did what?" I had thought he would have been happy to get to eat, but I
could tell even through his hoarse whisper that he was furious.

"I took the blood myself. I'm clean. You can drink it."

He tried to toss the bag away, to push it onto the floor, but he didn't have the
strength. "I won't. I won't drink your blood."

"You already did, remember? It's clean. You didn't die. I won't make you sick."

"That's not it, Bella," he said, trying to push himself up to sitting. I grasped his
hands and helped up. Wearily he leaned against the arm of the sofa as he opened
his eyes, hissing against the brightness. He was like a newborn animal seeing the
world for the first time.

"What is it, then?"

"I never … we didn't feed from people," he said. "I don't know what will happen if
I drink this. I don't know what that will make me."

"I know it'll make you strong."

"I don't want to be a monster," he said.

"How are you a monster? This blood is given freely, willingly, and…" I blushed,
wondering if I should say the next part, "with love." I looked at my feet until he
spoke again.

"I won't," he said, shaking his head slightly. I couldn't imagine how much
strength it took him just to move that much.

"Goddammit, Edward, you will." I brought the bag up to his nose. "Can't you
smell that? Can't you smell the blood? It will revive you."

He pulled away as much as he could. "Do not tempt me, Bella. I will not drink
your blood. I've done so many bad things in my life; I could not bear it if I took
from you."

"But I've taken it from myself already," I said, growing angrier with his strange
morality.

"Vampires … can't die from starvation," he said firmly.

I brought the bag closer with my good hand, hoping to awaken some survival
instinct in him, but he kept pulling away, despite being just taut skin on iron
bone. My left wrist still ached, but I still pulled my left hand back and struck him
on the face as hard as I could. "Drink it. You have to. I know you won't die from
starvation, but look at you! How can I eat when you can't? How can I breathe and
let this blood, your food, flow through my veins when you are starving?"

I hit him again and again, and he made no move to stop me. I just wanted him to
grow so furious that he'd just tear into the bag, into me, whatever. I just wanted
him to eat something. My wrist was throbbing now, most likely sprained from my
fall, and certainly bruised from hitting his unbreakable face.

Irritated, I rubbed my chin roughly with my knuckles. A bit of grit from the road
was stuck under the skin, and I began picking at the pieces, reopening my
wound. I became compulsive about it, scratching and digging and trying to get
every grain out, until even I could smell the iron of my blood in the air. I heard
something like a growl come from Edward, and his eyes were finally open, black
as night. He looked like an animal. "Edward?" I asked, but it seemed as though
he could no longer hear me.

If he hadn't been so exhausted, I'm sure he would have killed me right there, but
his lunge at me was slow enough for me to dodge. Now was the time. I shoved
the bag in his face, and he tore into it with his teeth, sucking and gulping and
snarling. I backed away, my task complete, and watched with fascination as life
seemed to flow from his face down his neck and into the rest of his body. He had
no idea I was in the room—for him the entire world now consisted only of him
and the bag in his hands.

When the bag was empty, he tore it apart with his teeth, greedily seeking more.
The plastic was soon in shreds, the tiny remaining drops of blood staining the
dusty rug. He closed his eyes and sniffed at the air, and then his head snapped
toward me. My chin was still oozing a little, and I covered it with my good hand,
hoping to mask the smell.

A tiny smile danced at the corners of his mouth, and with a smooth, cruel voice I
didn't recognize, he said, "Bella, you really shouldn't have done that."

He rose slowly to his feet, but before I could celebrate how my blood had brought
him strength, he said just one word:

"Run."

Chapter 10: Slip

In gym class, I was always last pick. It didn't bother me; I'd long ago accepted
that I was no good on my feet. I was exceptionally good at falling, at tripping, at
spraining. I'd often used the phrase "as if my life depended upon it," but I'd
never really thought about it.

Right now, I was thinking about it pretty hard, about as hard as my heart was
beating against my ribs. I took a moment to look down at my feet, thankful I
hadn't unlaced my sneakers when I walked in the house. Without shoes, I was as
good as dead. If I were being honest with myself, I was probably as good as dead
with shoes or without. For a second, I considered doing nothing, of just letting
the monster take me. Would it be so bad? Would it be worse than what I had?
Wouldn't eternal sleep be … a relief?

No, Bella, I could imagine Charlie saying to me. Fight. Always fight. Go!

It felt as though Charlie somehow propelled me, as if I'd been loaded into a
slingshot. I ran, limbs flying, looking like an idiot. I scrambled through the dark
hallway and through the kitchen, hurtling out the back door of the house. I could
hear him behind me, swearing. If he hadn't been so weak to begin with, I would
be dead by now, crushed under his weight, torn apart by his hands and teeth. I
could picture myself under him, my lifeless eyes glassy, unseeing. I'd seen
enough dead bodies to know exactly what I'd look like.

Even considering his weakened condition, it would take a miracle to outrun him.

I didn't know where to run, or if there were anywhere I could hide. He would find
me. Did I regret giving him my blood? Did I regret it, even if he ended up killing
me? As my lungs burned from exertion, I realized I didn't regret one thing. He
had been hungry, and I had had food. I hadn't talked to the clouds as much since
he'd come here. If I'd been given the offer to trade my solitary life for a few
moments of tenderness, of companionship, I would have made the same
decision. No regrets.

And still, I ran. I heard metal twisting behind me, and I knew he'd taken the door
off its hinges. He was like a wild animal, a rabid dog. There was no reasoning
with him. He had been reduced to his most basic nature, and I couldn't blame
him. In the last few months before Forks had become a town with only one
citizen, I'd seen the worst of humanity, people doing horrible things to each other
because they knew they had nothing left to lose. That was more horrible to me,
because they'd had a choice. They'd willingly decided that since everyone was
dying, they might as well act on their basest, most taboo desires. That was how
they chose to spend their last moments on the earth.

Edward was just trying to survive. I couldn't blame him for that.

There was a stitch in my side, and my wrist started to hurt more. I turned around
to see where Edward was. He would be upon me in a few more strides. I felt a
burst of energy as I heard Charlie in my head telling me to fight, never to
surrender. I ran, still looking over my shoulder.

I should have known by now that I was no good at multitasking when it came to
matters of coordination. I hit a patch of loose pebbles in the street, and my feet
were swept from under me. I tried to break my fall with my bad arm, yelping in
pain when I felt something snap. I had been running so fast that my momentum
propelled me along the asphalt, taking a layer of skin with it as I skid to a stop.

Would Charlie be proud of me? Would he think I'd fought hard enough?

It would be over soon anyway. Just a few moments now. I could just close my
eyes and wait. Sleep now; it's over. I'd join the others, all the others. I hoped
Charlie would be there, right on the other side, waiting for me.

Edward was on top of me now, just as I'd imagined seconds before. He pinned
me down by my shoulders. If I had to die, I was glad, at least, that I would die
from contact with another being. I would not be consumed from the inside out by
a rapidly replicating virus: nameless, cruel, unfeeling.

Given the events of the last few months, it was a blessing, really.

I could feel the blood slick on my arm, and my wrist throbbed as my heart
continued to beat. His hands will leave bruises, I thought, and it struck me how
strange it was that these would be my last thoughts. As if bruises would matter,
after.

I'd closed my eyes, thinking it would be easier, or the right thing to do. But I
found in this last moment that I didn't want to go like this, to slip into forever in
the dark behind the veils of my eyelids. I would open my eyes. I would say
goodbye to the sun. I let my eyes open, hungrily taking in everything around me,
even the face of my killer.

The pale sun shone behind him, making a halo around his head, my angel of
death. He was beautiful even as he acted on pure animal instinct, perhaps even
more beautiful. I looked deeply into his eyes, dark, tinged with red. As far as last
sights went, this one wasn't bad.

I tried to relax as I waited for the end.

He moved as if to strike, and I braced myself, wondering if it would hurt, or if I'd
be gone before I felt the pain. I wasn't afraid; I was calm and curious, and I'd
never felt more alive.

I was lucky. This wasn't how Charlie had gone, babbling and delirious and in
agony.

I gazed at him and waited.

He stared at me, locking eyes with mine. I imagined I could feel his teeth at my
throat, feel the life draining out of me the way I'd watched my blood flow through
the tubing into the donation bag.

He stared at me with those eyes like the starless night, and I did not look away. I
took him in, knowing his face would be the last thing I'd see. My last memory.

"I'm glad it's you," I said.

He gripped my shoulders more tightly, and I braced myself for the end. I waited
for the teeth, the burning, the slow, final slipping into sleep.

I felt his body shake, convulsing. Had my blood been infected after all? I didn't
know how quickly the virus killed his kind.

I studied his face, twisted in agony. His lips moved so quickly I couldn't tell if he
were speaking at all. If I didn't focus on the words, on the rapidly moving lips,
meaning slowly emerged like a raised image in a stereogram. "No," he said over
and over. "You can fight this." I was reminded of the story he'd told me about his
family, how his sister had held on as long as her love had held her hand. But his
body shook, his fingers piercing through the thin fabric of my shirt, easily slipping
inside the smooth flesh underneath as if my skin were as fragile as eggshell, as
porous as if it were made of vapor.

"You can," I said, his fingers feeling like ice inside my flesh. There was pain, but it
was so strange, so different, that I barely even winced. "You're strong enough to
fight the disease. I'm sorry. I thought my blood was clean."

"The disease?" He threw his head back and laughed cruelly. "Your blood is clean,
foolish one."

"Then what are you fighting?" I asked, barely able to draw breath with his weight
on me.

He convulsed again, looking ill. "I'm trying not to kill you, Bella."

"Oh," I said, as I looked into the endless dark of his eyes. "Well, I forgive you if
you can't."

As if he'd been burned, he pushed himself off of me and scrambled away, looking
like a crab scuttling on the bottom of the ocean. He hunched over in a ball and
clutched at his hair. "Go away, Bella," he said, not looking up. "Run far from me.
I'm not safe. I won't follow you. I'm strong enough for that, but not enough not
to kill you if you don't get away from me now."

I stood up slowly, shakily, looking at him, wondering if my legs still worked.

"Please, just go," he said, his head hung down, muffled into his shirt, "before I
lose control. I don't know how long I can be lucid, how long I can hold the demon
back."

"I don't care," I said, and I was surprised to discover that I didn't. My legs
remained rooted to the ground.

He scratched at the earth frantically, finally finding a handful of pebbles and
throwing them at me. "Go!" he yelled as a pebble glanced off my cheek.

"I won't," I said, but he continued to pelt me with rocks.

"Go!" he roared with such ferocity that I was finally afraid.

I turned and ran, not looking back. I didn't hear his footsteps behind me, only
rocks thudding by my feet, feeling an occasional stinging pain when a pebble hit
my bare skin.

I ran until my legs gave out, and I realized I hadn't counted my steps from the
house. I knew where I was, but not having a number in my head made me feel
hopelessly lost.

I stopped running and turned, slowly, not sure of what I might see.

There was nothing but a lone silhouette in the distance, curled tightly unto itself,
as if he hoped that by crushing himself in his own arms, he might disappear
altogether.

A/N: Thank you to feathers_mmmm for reccing me in the last chapter of
Wallbanger! Thank you to Mrs. TheKing for choosing this story for the first Twitter
#readalong!

Chapter 11: Patience

I didn't know where to run. I had half a mind to double back and return to the
house, but I wondered if Edward would follow me there, despite his promises not
to. My shoulders throbbed from where his fingers had pierced me, and I could see
blood beginning to soak through my shirt—not too much, but enough to remind
me how much I'd ruined everything. I was berating myself, wondering if I'd really
screwed everything up with the only company—okay, I'd say it: friend—I'd had in
months. But what choice had I had? How long would he have lasted on our
couch? He was walking now, wasn't he? I argued back and forth with myself in
my head.

Where would I go now? I'd been crying so hard that all I could see through my
tears as I ran were blurry streaks of brown and green and palest blue. Since I'd
stopped counting steps, I didn't know where I'd end up. When I was calm enough
to get my bearings, I saw I was near the high school. All the windows were
broken, giving the building the appearance of an old man who had lost most of
his teeth.

"Come on, Bella. Don't be lame." Eric was putting a rock in my hand. "Who's
going to do anything to us now?"

"I can't," I said. "I don't care if we won't get caught. What's the point in
destroying the school?"

Forks High had been shut down for about a month now, and the town was slowly
deteriorating. Most people who weren't sick stayed in their homes, their doors
bolted, afraid of the roving gangs of kids out for a thrill kill. It was like living in a
Clockwork Orange world. The truth was, Charlie didn't even want me out of the
house, but I had begun to feel as though I were suffocating in the air in our small
home. He still had to go to work and patrol, but he'd given me one of his guns
and told me how to use it. "You can't trust anyone, Bella," he'd said when I'd
initially refused the firearm.

I hadn't had to use it—so far. Maybe our house didn't stand out, or maybe
Charlie's reputation was enough to keep the thrill-seekers away. Charlie could be
downright scary when he wanted to be, the typical quiet, patient, measured guy:
unflappable until pushed just a bit too hard. When he snapped, he would never
even raise his voice, but a few words murmured in That Tone, and no one dared
to fuck with him.

He trusted me not to do anything stupid, so he didn't lock me into the house or
anything. It was just understood that I was to stay home, gun at the ready.
When Eric knocked on my door, I broke out in a cold sweat, looking at the gun on
my desk, wondering if I could possibly use it, if I could possibly take someone's

life, even in self-defense. I looked through the peephole and relaxed when I saw
it was just Yorkie. "What do you want?" I yelled at him through the door.

"C'mon, Bella, come out with me and the guys."

I thought of Charlie, could imagine his disapproving stare, but I said yes anyway.
I hadn't talked to anyone besides Charlie in so long. We all wore facemasks now
out in public, as if it would help. It reminded me of all the silly TSA regulations
toward the end, about liquids and gels and removing your shoes. These little
rituals helped us feel safer, as if putting one's shoes through the x-ray could
prevent a terrorist attack. With the right person and training, any innocuous
object could become a deadly weapon. And so, before I did the incredibly stupid
thing of leaving my house, I put on a little paper mask, just because it made me
feel less afraid. Even though deep down, we all knew they wouldn't save anyone.

I slipped on my jacket and shoes and opened the door to see Eric and a few of his
friends, barely recognizable with their face masks. "Where're we going?" I asked,
shoving my hands in deep into the pockets of my jeans.

"Just follow us, young grasshopper," he said, and I'd seen so much horror and
destruction in the last few months that I had almost no sense of self-preservation
left. Almost. Charlie's gun was tucked into my waistband, the cold metal a
constant reminder that I did, on some level, still want to stay alive.

And so we'd ended up by our old high school, where we ought to have been that
moment had the world remained remotely normal. I wondered what class I would
have had right then. I'd already begun to have trouble keeping track of the days
of the week. Eric and his friends took no time before they were chucking rocks at
the school, laughing and slapping each other the back if they broke a pane in one
of the second or third floor windows.

"Don't you want to try it?" Eric asked. I just shook my head and dropped the rock
he'd pressed into my hand a moment earlier.

"Suit yourself," he shrugged, and I slipped away before they could even notice I
was gone.

I stood at the main entrance of the school, remembering how many times I'd
trudged up and down these steps, how many days I'd dreaded going through the
doors. Some mornings I'd wanted to lie in bed all day, sleeping, reading,
watching the sun slowly meander across the floorboards of my room as the hours
passed. But now, now I would give anything to be back inside, sitting in a
cracked wooden seat with a wobbly writing surface clamped to its frame, years of
ballpoint graffiti smudged on the surface. I'd give anything to be bored out of my
mind and half-asleep and itching for the bell to ring. Boredom was a luxury. If
you were bored, it meant you weren't afraid, that all your needs were met but
being entertained. I missed the boredom, the blissful cluelessness of not knowing
what was to come.

The last surviving vandals had long since busted open the doors, so it was easy
enough to step inside. The school didn't smell of decay—it had been shut a while
before the final waves of the illness wiped out our town.

It was dark and cool inside, and I had to step carefully because of the shattered
glass that no one had bothered to clean—perhaps there had been nobody left to
clean, after the damage had been done. I wandered through the hallways, letting
my hand trail along the pebbly surface of the painted cinderblock walls, stopping
when I reached the infirmary. There were still cots here, even rolls of that crinkly
paper they'd put on top for hygienic purposes. I pulled a new sheet of paper

across the nearest cot and curled up on top, wondering who was the last body to
lie here. I remembered resting here so many times, pretending to have a
headache when I just wanted to sleep. Sometimes I'd injured myself in gym or
bio lab, and I'd wait here until Charlie could pick me up to take me to the doctor.
I never got the cold or flu or stomach bugs, but I sure was good at dislocating
things and bleeding. It all evened out, I guessed.

I found an unused Ace bandage in a drawer of the school nurse's desk, and I
wrapped up my bad wrist, which had swollen since my fall. It didn't hurt too
much. I would probably need to make a sling at some point, but I was too cold to
attempt to tear my shirt apart now.

I watched the sun go down until darkness fell completely. With no electricity and
no stars in the sky, you may as well have had your eyes closed. I wouldn't go
anywhere here now, not until sunrise, not familiar enough with the floorplan to be
able to wander confidently in the dark the way I could at home. It was so quiet
that I jumped when my stomach growled. When was the last I had eaten?
Definitely before I'd gone to the health clinic. I'd only imagined the juice and
cookies after filling the donation bag with blood. I'd been rationing my food for a
while, and I certainly didn't need as much as I did before in order to get through
the day, but the loss of blood, the running, and the hours without eating … I
simply couldn't get comfortable enough to sleep.

I wondered where Edward was, and if he had grown weak again already. I
wondered when I'd next see his eyes, and who would be staring back at me if we
ever found each other again. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried, in vain, to sleep.

The boys hadn't noticed I'd left them, and I thought how silly I was for having
thought going out with them was a good idea. I was just lucky nothing bad had
happened to me while I was out there. I started to wander back home, hoping to
beat Charlie there. I didn't want him to know I'd disobeyed him. There was a shift
in the wind, and my heart started to race. I thought about how small animals
seemed to know when a catastrophic event was coming. Could they smell it, or
was it just a vibration running through the ground and up and into their bodies?
All I knew was that I was being followed, and that I was not safe. My hand
slipped around the gun I'd tucked into my waistband, colder than the steel which
had by now warmed to my body temperature.

I started to walk faster, my face in full bitchface mode. Charlie had told me
before a school trip to Seattle that whenever I walked around at night, even with
a group of friends, I should always put my bitchface on. "Look tough, Bella. Walk
with purpose. Look as though you would go apeshit if anyone so much as looked
at you the wrong way." He'd made me practice my bitchface for him, and we'd
both laughed so hard as he'd tried to coach me, demonstrating his best
mustachioed bitchface for me. I knew what he was saying was dead serious, but
honestly, getting guidance from Charlie on the finer points of bitchery and its
uses in self-defense could lead only to the both of us lying on the floor, clutching
our bellies and wheezing from laughter.

I had no urge to laugh now, as my heart beat faster and faster, as I heard the
rustling behind me come closer. There was the sickening sound of a thick metal
chain being dragged along the asphalt, and I knew that whoever was behind me
had, at the very least, crude weapons.

"Stop following me," I said, not turning around.

Cruel laughter. "Who put you in charge, little girl?"

I turned slowly, the gun in my sweaty hands nearly slipping out of my grasp.
They were two burnouts from school—they'd graduated long before I'd ever
stepped foot in Forks High, but they were the kind who always hung around the
school, hoping for easy girls looking for older guys with cars and the power to buy
beer. The guy who'd spoken, the bigger of the two, wore his letterman jacket,
even though he clearly had outgrown his lean high school physique soon after
graduation. Neither wore face masks. I knew the type immediately—the danger
seekers, the ones who figured life was over anyway, so they might as well be as
bad as they could, since they didn't think any of us would live long enough to
have to answer for their actions.

"We won't hurt you," he said with an oily smile. "We just want to talk."

"I'm listening," I said, muffled behind the paper mask. He hadn't seen the gun
yet. He was focused on my wide eyes, on the waves of fear rolling off of me. I
straightened my spine and tried to look him in the face. "What do you want?"

"I want to know how loudly you can scream," he said, lunging toward me.

Before I could consider the morality of what I was about to do, I'd already
squeezed the trigger, and he had crumpled to the ground. I'd shot him
somewhere in the abdomen.

"Jesus, help me," he moaned, but his friend just stared at him, smirking. His
friend looked at me, at the barrel of the gun, and shrugged, walking away.

"Where are you going, Artie?" he cried. "You can't leave me here!"

"Whatever, dude," Artie said, shuffling off and whistling, swinging his chain in big,
heavy circles.

I backed away from the brute as he clutched his stomach, blood blossoming out
shockingly from the wound. I was surprised I'd managed to hit him at all. I didn't
wait to find out if the shot had been fatal. I just ran all the way back home, trying
to pretend the screaming I heard was just some wild animal. Once I was safely
inside again, I put the gun back on my desk, changed clothes, and washed my
face.

When Charlie came home a few hours later, he said, "Anything new?"

"Nothing's ever new anymore," I said, sighing and walking up to him to peck his
cheek.

Every time I shifted my weight, the crinkly paper brought me to full alertness. I
was too hungry and worked up to sleep, and I was cold, lying here on the paper-
covered cot without blankets. I missed the smell of my house.

The puncture wounds on my shoulders had already stopped bleeding, and I
gingerly got to my feet. I started talking to myself to hear my voice bounce off
the walls, to get a sense of how close I was to walking into things. With my good
hand, I found the doorway, and I followed the edge of the wall back out the main
doors, placing each footstep carefully, trying to kick away any glass shards. Once
I got out the main doors of the school, I'd be able to find my way home without
looking.

How many steps from the front entrance of the school back to the house? It was
well into the thousands, and I counted, wishing I could hear any sound besides
my breathing and the shuffling of my sneakers on dusty earth. There used to be
the hooting of owls, the rumble of motorbikes, the clicking and singing of insects.

Toward the end there was nothing but screaming, gunshots, things shattering. I
didn't miss those days. I whistled low, trying to mimic an owl, and I made
clucking sounds with my tongue, trying my best to sound like an innocuous bug.
And in my head, I was always counting, counting, counting backwards down to
zero, back to my house.

The front door was open as it always was, and I crept to the living room, hoping
that maybe Edward would have come back here, that he'd be on the couch, that
today hadn't happened, and I could slip under the afghan and lie next to his cool
body. But the sofa was flat, unoccupied. I nodded, understanding what it all
meant, that I was once again alone.

My stomach's growling reminded me why I'd had to come home in the first place,
and I went to the kitchen, picking a can at random. I didn't normally eat in the
dark. I knew from the heft of the can that it wasn't soup, and the lack of pop top
told me it wasn't anything from the Chef Boyardee family. I fumbled for the can
opener, cranking the lid off clumsily. I eased my finger under the lid to bend it
back, careful not to cut myself on the jagged edge of the metal. Boston baked
beans. I found a spoon and shoveled the cold beans greedily into my mouth. I
used to find Boston baked beans repugnant, disturbingly sweet—I mean, for
god's sake, they were beans, not candy. But I didn't care now, just wanting the
pinching and churning in my stomach to stop.

When the can was empty, I left it on the counter with the spoon still inside. I
didn't want to deal with cleanup in the dark. I was suddenly exhausted.

I took my shoes off and tiptoed up the stairs, pushing open Charlie's door and
crawling under his blanket as if I'd had a bad dream. "I messed up, Daddy," I
whispered to the pillow dressed in Charlie's comforting plaid. I propped my bad
arm on the pillow and tried, again, to sleep.

After weeks of sleeping with Edward by my side, Charlie's bed seemed even
emptier than before. "I'll find you again," I promised, "no matter how long it
takes." Tomorrow, I would look. I would wander and try to bring him out.

"I'll find you," I said, setting my jaw, "even if I have to search forever." I sat with
my eyes open, staring up at the dark, which lay like a thick mantle between me
and the ceiling.

"I'll find you," I said, swallowing hard, "even if you end up killing me."

Now that I'd experienced being with another sentient creature again, I knew I
couldn't survive long completely alone. It had been hard enough to adjust the
first time. If I had to get used to being alone again, and this time forever, I would
die. I would rather he killed me.

And if he didn't come back, there was some comfort in knowing Charlie's gun still
had at least one bullet left in it.

Chapter 12: Worry

The throbbing in my arm woke me before the sunlight. I lay in the big, empty bed
while I waited for the sun to rise. I counted my heartbeats as the darkness

outside slowly crept away, nudged away by the light. The world was still
revolving, turning its face toward the sun. When there was light enough in
Charlie's room, I unwrapped the Ace bandage to check on the swelling. My wrist
had turned many shades of purple and pale green, and I would have thought it
quite pretty if it hadn't been my own skin. The swelling wasn't so bad. My body
was probably so used to being injured that it healed extra quickly. I went to the
bathroom to examine yesterday's damage in the tiny mirror on the medicine
cabinet. I pulled the first aid kit from under the sink, finding an alcohol wipe. I
dabbed at my chin and pulled my shirt collar away from my neck, exposing first
one shoulder, then the other. The puncture wounds from Edward's fingers had
already scabbed over, and I brushed my hands lightly over them, almost enjoying
the soreness. The pain was proof I hadn't imagined it all. He had been here. But
what little joy I received at the confirmation of his existence was negated by the
crushing realization that he was gone.

I tried to go back to my pre-Edward routine, downstairs for breakfast, reading the
last paper, but I felt like an echo of myself, a trapped image forever going
through the same motions. I looked at the mess we'd left in the living room, the
overturned furniture, the shredded remnants of the donation bag. I sat heavily on
the sofa, thinking that just a day ago, he had been lying here.

Realizing sitting there doing nothing was not going to change the situation, I
forced myself up and back to the kitchen. I cleaned up the baked beans from the
night before, dampened a cloth and wiped my spoon clean, and took another few
mouthfuls of rainwater. The sky seemed to be churning, clouds swirling and
quarreling in the heavens. Maybe we would get rain today.

The possibility of rain at least gave me something new to do to avoid thinking
about my loneliness. I went outside and circled the house, checking on all my
rain-collection receptacles. After everything seemed to be in order, I lay on my
back on the grass in the front lawn, my arms stretched wide as if to hug the sky,
and watched the clouds billow and darken.

I played with the grass with my fingers, and the sensation triggered memories
that seeped into my head, unbidden, of sleeping next to him on the sofa as he
breathed shallowly. I'd drift off, and when I'd wake from a nightmare, my fingers
would be twisted in his hair, which felt surprisingly delicate despite the cold
hardness of the rest of him. His hair felt remarkably like … hair. If he'd been
human and this starved, his hair probably would have fallen out in clumps, but
the strands clung stubbornly to his scalp, soft and inviting, if not exactly warm.

I smelled green, a reminder of late spring at Forks High, when we'd have the
windows open, and the sound of the lawn mowers mixed with the smell of cut
grass and the potent gasoline vapors would interrupt the teacher's droning, and
we'd know summer was near. I realized I'd been tearing out grass by the handful,
my fingers now stained with chlorophyll.

The ubiquitous presence of grass frustrated me. It was the only thing that grew
readily, the only thing that could survive the scarcity of rain and the dullness of
the sunshine. All edible plants had shriveled and disappeared. I could barely
remember what fresh produce tasted like. Once, desperate to eat something
green and from the ground, I'd tried to chew on a few tough blades, but I'd
choked and gagged and hadn't tried it again. The trees somehow still lived, but
they produced no fruit. There were no bees left to help pollinate, or maybe the
trees had just lost the will to try to bring new life into the world. Maybe there
were nutrients enough in the soil and air to survive, but not to thrive, not to truly
live.

Every day on my walks, I would touch tree trunks as I passed, like a strange,
passive version of Duck-Duck-Goose. Sometimes the bark would crumble away in
my fingers, and I'd know that tree would soon be gone too. The trees didn't die
as rapidly as the people had—I thought of the redwood trees in Muir Woods
Charlie and I had visited once on a summer vacation, my amazement that some
of these trees had been alive when the Declaration of Independence had been
signed. I wondered if those trees still lived, or if they'd decided they had seen
enough of this world.

Maybe one tree a month died, but I mourned each one as if it had been a friend.
Some of the more unusually shaped ones I'd named, wishing that dryads existed.
"Won't you come to life for me?" I'd ask.

If the wind blew, shaking the dry leaves, I'd pretend it had answered me. "Not
yet," I'd imagine it had said, gently bowing its head to me.

I brought my fingers to my face and inhaled deeply. The smell of fresh-cut grass
was potent, transporting me back to a simpler time, even after the virus had
begun to spread, but before it had hit Washington State. We still laughed it off. It
was easy to pretend it was just a scary movie on TV when we hadn't yet
experienced it firsthand.

Charlie and Billy were having a serious talk, so they'd sent Jake and me outside.
"Go out and play," Charlie said, as if we were still little children.

I sat on the stoop for a while, the damp cold of the concrete seeping into my
jeans, and I poked at the ground with a stick. "What's all that about?" I asked
Jake.

He shrugged. "Tribal shit, I guess. There have been a lot of meetings. People are
getting scared. The stars are sending messages. I don't know, Bella. I'm kind of
worried. I didn't think I'd be, but, god, I'm just a kid. What if this is it?"

I slipped my hand in his and gave it a little squeeze. "It's going to be okay," I
said, even if I didn't really believe it. "They're the adults. They're supposed to fix
things."

"Do you really believe that?" he asked, his eyes wide and frightened. I hadn't
seen him this afraid ever. He was always the bold kid, not afraid of spiders or
crawly things, of darkness, of things in the woods.

I swallowed hard. "Of course," I lied. I squeezed his hand again.

"I've never even been kissed," he said, looking at his feet. "It might all be over,
and I'll die just a kid, a little kid."

I knew he was hoping that I'd lean in and kiss him, and I nearly did, but then I
thought a pity kiss would be worse than no kiss at all. So instead I laughed and
said, "Kissing doesn't make you an adult."

"I love you, Bella," he said, dead serious, so I punched him in the arm, hard.

"Stop that shit right now," I said, and watched as he massaged the place I'd hit
him. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Ow." His ego seemed more bruised than his arm. "I just, you know, wanted to
tell you … in case anything happens. I want you to know that."

"Well, nothing is going to happen, dork. And I love you too."

He ducked his head more and smiled. We leaned against each other and watched
the grass ripple in the wind. It looked almost like rolling waves of the ocean. It
was hypnotic, and I began to nod off on his shoulder.

I woke up as he tried to kiss my temple, and I jerked back. "You asshole," I said,
my hand clenched in a fist, ready to pop him one.

"Sorry," he muttered, holding his hands up defensively. He lowered them slowly.
"No, I guess you have every right to hit me." He tilted his head toward me and
set his jaw. "I'm ready. Take a swing."

He looked so pathetic and scared that I didn't have the heart to slug him. "Well,
that takes all the fun out of it," I joked, letting my hand unclench like a flower
and drop back by my side, a harmless open palm.

His eyes lit up. "So you'll kiss me?"

"Oh my fucking fuck, you are relentless!" I stood up and stormed down the stairs,
tripping over my untied shoelaces and falling onto the soft grass.

"Are you okay, Bells?" He scrambled after me, extending a hand to help me up. I
waved him off.

"I will never kiss you, Jacob Black. Never. So stop with the bugging, okay?" I
breathed in the good, earthy smell of the lawn. Spring was coming soon. "Life is
going to go on. Nothing is going to happen. Nothing but dances and acne and
heartache and term papers and graduations and growing up and college and …
life."

"Okay," he said, flopping next to me on the grass.

The front door creaked open behind us, and Charlie and Billy cleared their throats
in unison. They both wore the same expression: a falsely bright smile, with eyes
clouded over with worry and doubt. "Well, we'd better head back home," said
Billy, and Jacob hopped up. He tried to help me up again, but I stubbornly folded
my arms. I was still annoyed with him.

"Well, bye," he said, shrugging, before getting back in the car. I rolled onto my
back and waved to him without bothering to get up.

It was the last time I'd see him—alive, at least. The Quileutes soon closed down
the reservation to visitors, hoping the self-imposed quarantine would protect
them. But when the virus crept closer and closer to our little corner of
Washington State, they hadn't thought that the animals would carry the disease,
that the virus was transmitted easily from animal to human, from human to
animal and to human again. And with their borders closed, medical aid couldn't
get to them—not that it would have helped, once the birds and insects carried the
virus to their lands. But the drugs and medical assistance could have at least
slowed the disease's rapid takeover of the patient's immune system, or made the
patient more comfortable, oblivious.

When Charlie got off the phone with Billy that one awful day, telling me that
Jacob had fallen ill and died, I sank to the floor in the kitchen, studying the
grungy linoleum tile as if it were a map that might tell me what to do, how to
think, how to make it through this. I should have kissed him when he asked. It
would have meant the world to him. And I couldn't—wouldn't—do it.

Charlie got down on the floor next to me and tried to wrap me in his arms, but I
pushed him away. "Bells, we all hurt," he said.

I shook my head vigorously. "No, Dad, it's not like that. I had a chance to make
his life happy, to give him the one thing he wanted, and I wouldn't, because I
didn't want to give him the wrong idea. Because I thought I was better than he
was, or something."

"What, exactly, was Jacob Black asking for?" Charlie spoke quietly, with hidden
menace.

"Jeez, Dad, no. Just a kiss. He wanted me to kiss him, just so he would have
known what it was like, to kiss a girl." I curled onto my side and sobbed. "And
now he'll never …"

Charlie smoothed out my hair, waited a moment, and then got up to get me a
paper towel. "You're too hard on yourself, Bells," he said, squatting again by me.
"You might have kissed him, but it wouldn't have changed anything. And if you
didn't mean it, well, it wasn't what he would have wanted anyway. He wanted
you to feel something for him that you didn't, and you were being honest—with
yourself and with him."

"Okay, Dad," I said, but guilt still tore at my insides like a rabid dog. A few days
later the Quileutes had opened their borders again, in time for Jacob's funeral,
and I'd kissed his powdery, unreal forehead during the wake. It was too late then
for him anyway, but I felt I owed it to him, somehow.

My face was wet, lying on the same grass where Jacob and I had worried about
the end of the world. I thought I was crying, but when I opened my eyes, I saw
that it had just started to rain. It began as a few fat drops, and then the heavens
ripped apart, pouring down water and soaking me to the bone. I stood up and
spread my arms wide, spinning in a slow circle, catching raindrops in my mouth. I
was parched, but now I could drink the remainder of the water in the jug inside
the house. A rain this hard would give me enough water for weeks.

I stood in the rain and cried for Jacob, for Charlie, for Renee, for all my friends
and family and just those people you saw every day but didn't know by name. My
hot tears were washed away again and again by the rain, but I couldn't tell if it
was forgiving or condemning me.

It's just rain, I thought. It's just wet and cold. Not everything has meaning. I
corrected myself: Nothing has meaning.

With heavy steps, I trudged back into the house, shivering. Folded neatly and set
on the banister was one of our large bath towels. I never put towels there, and
there certainly hadn't been a towel on the banister before I'd gone outside.
Edward? Had he been here? The towel was scratchy and dingy, since rainwater
and line-drying didn't exactly recreate the softness of Downy plus a dryer sheet,
but at least it was dry, a comfort as my teeth chattered. I wondered what color
my lips were.

I dried myself off roughly, feeling just a little bit cleaner. My hair hadn't been
soaked like that in several weeks, and I never remembered until I felt it again
how much I missed the once-mundane, now precious sensation of damp hair on
my neck and shoulders. It reminded me of being late for school, not having time
to blow my hair dry. I could hear Charlie yell after me, "You'll catch your death!"
as I ran for my truck with a bagel crammed in my mouth.

I'll catch my death.

If only it were that easy.

I untied my damp shoelaces and turned my shoes over, hoping they'd dry without
getting mildewed. My feet had already started to wrinkle from the wet soles, so
unaccustomed they were now to being wet. I wrapped the towel around me as if I
were a kid at the beach just coming out of the ocean, looking for her family in the
sea of blankets and bright sun umbrellas.

I wanted to call out for Edward, but I was too afraid of hearing nothing but the
absence of his voice, so I wrapped the towel more tightly around myself as if it
were his arms, aching to know where he was right this minute.

Heel-toe, heel-toe, slowly I walked into the living room. All evidence of the
struggle from yesterday was now gone, the shreds of plastic swept away, the
afghan carefully folded and placed over the arm of the sofa. The coffee table had
been put back into place, the furniture righted and set back into the divots in the
rug. It was as if he'd never been here. I touched the sore spots on my shoulders
again, pushing against the barely scabbed over wounds, wincing and rejoicing in
the pain. "He was real," I said to the room. "He was here. He did this to me." But
the furniture just sat there like always, like it was any normal day except for the
rainwater that cascaded down the windowpanes.

I sat on the couch, knees to my chest, hair still dripping at the very ends. I
listened to the rain tap against the roof and the windows, glad for the sound, glad
not to be sitting in silence.

I stared out the window, squinting to see through the windowpanes streaked with
the unceasing rain. Was it the movement of the water down the glass, or did I
see something—someone—outside? I ran to the big window, pressing my nose
against the glass, and I could swear I saw a form hurrying away. "Edward?" I
dared to whisper, and when I pulled back, all I could see was the smudge my
nose had left on the glass.

Chapter 13: Alone

The rain didn't stop, even when darkness fell. I wouldn't put the towel away. It
was the only tangible thing that Edward had given me. Well, sure, it was my
towel, and it was more like he placed the towel where I might find it, but still. It
was a gift from him, one that hadn't caused me pain.

I wrapped myself in the towel, rubbing my face on its scratchiness, and I
stretched out on the couch where Edward had lain for so many days. He'd left a
slight indentation in the sofa cushions, and if I moved just so, I could fit into the
contours his body had left, as if the couch had a memory of its own.

Sleep didn't come. I was so used to dead silence that the storm outside
prevented my brain from shutting off. Still, I was grateful for the rain—it would
be good to have enough water to wash, to drink as much as I wanted. The
raindrops tapped against the roof and the glass, and if I squeezed my eyes shut
hard I could pretend that it was just a late rainstorm that had knocked out the
power. Charlie wasn't home from work yet, and it was a normal day. Just a
blackout, and when Charlie came home, we would sit on the living room rug and
try to play Scrabble by candlelight. Blackout nights with Charlie were the best. If
Charlie didn't like the tiles he'd drawn, he'd hold them one by one in the flame of
the nearest candle, trying to set the little wooden tiles on fire.

"You're really just an arsonist at heart, aren't you?" I'd ask, and Charlie would
pretend to be offended and spell out some completely immature word like "poo"
on his turn. "Who will police the police?" I'd say, shaking my head, and Charlie
would laugh and twirl the ends of his mustache like a cartoon villain. In the
candlelight, the contours of his face were exaggerated, and he looked almost
sinister until I reminded myself that he was just Charlie, my goofy dad.

I smiled at the memory until I remembered that this wasn't just a blackout.
Charlie wouldn't come tonight. The lights would never come back on. It was just
me. I flopped around on the couch, trying to get comfortable, but my isolation
was unbearable tonight. God, I missed Charlie. I shouldn't have indulged in the
memory, so rich and precious, of our special father-daughter time.

Even though I'd been alone for months, I'd never felt so desolate. Why had
Edward ever come? I'd made an okay life for myself here, sticking to my
schedule, counting my steps. He changed everything, gave me something to look
forward to. And then he took it all away again.

Well, no, that wasn't fair—it had been my fault. I was the one who'd awoken the
predator within him. He hadn't wanted to; he'd known what he'd become. But I
pushed him. I wanted to take care of him. I wanted him to be healthy. I offered
up my body and ruined everything.

"Charlie," I said out loud, listening to the rain. "Why aren't you here? Why won't
you come home?" There was no use sleeping. I kicked off the blanket, but got up
carefully in order not to disturb the print Edward had left on the sofa.

In the dark, I felt my way toward the shelf in the short bookcase we used for all
the board games and sat down. I touched the sides of the boxes, until I felt the
ripped sides of the Scrabble box lid mended with masking tape—the game had
been Charlie's set from college. The last time we'd taped the sides back together
must have been when I was about ten. The tape was now brittle and flaking off,
the adhesive dried and useless. I shook the box, and when I heard the familiar
rattling of wooden tiles, I got up off the floor.

I wrapped the towel back around me like a cape and clutched the worn box to my
chest. Carefully I made my way out the back door, along the same path that I'd
run before when I was escaping Edward. The back door was hanging on by a bolt
or two, swinging in the wind like a loose tooth.

"Daddy, what's happening to me?" I cried in terror. I held up a tooth, my mouth
full of blood. It was the few weeks of the summer when I'd visit my dad.

"Oh, honey, you're growing up. One of your baby teeth fell out."

"I'm not a baby," I huffed. "I'm five years old."

"That's just what they're called, squirt," he said, rumpling my hair. "You have two
sets of teeth now, but one is invisible. Isn't that neat?"

"Where is the other set?"

"It's buried deep in your gums. But when you're ready, they start to push
through, and they make the other teeth fall out. Just like this one." He took the
tooth from me and appraised it like a jeweler. "Kind of neat that you did it here,
and not with your mom," he said, plunking it back into my tiny palm.

I studied the bit of bone and enamel in my hand. The roots of the tooth looked
like a spiky crown. A bit of my flesh was still stuck to it, and I pressed the sharp
points of the bone into the pad of my fingertip.

"What are the new teeth called?" I asked.

"Adult teeth, permanent teeth … I'm not sure," Charlie said, shrugging. "Maybe I
should have paid more attention in biology."

"Bio-what?"

"Biology. It's, like, science class, but about living things. I think it means 'study of
life.'"

"I have a hole in my mouth," I said, slightly forlorn.

"You'll get your new tooth—see?" Charlie was looking into my mouth and
examining the gap with his pinkie. "I can feel the new one poking out, you know,
like how tulips in the front yard poke their heads up in the spring?"

When he'd taken his finger out of my mouth, I poked at the spot with my tongue.
The flesh was still sore and bloody, but I could feel the sharp tip of something
against my tongue.

"Tonight, you'll put this tooth under your pillow, and in the morning, there will be
a surprise."

Charlie helped me wrap the tooth in a tissue, and we both tucked the little parcel
under my pillow. In the morning, just as he said, there was a crisp one dollar bill
underneath. "Wow!" I rarely had paper money, just the odd bits of loose change.

"The Tooth Fairy came, sweetheart!"

"I want to call Mommy," I said. So Charlie dialed the phone for me, and we both
told her what had happened.

"You're growing up so fast," she said, and she sounded sad. "I thought you'd lose
your first tooth in my house."

It was weird; I felt like I'd somehow betrayed her by not holding onto my teeth
until I was back home with her.

"Why does the Tooth Fairy give money for my teeth?" I asked after we'd hung up
the phone.

"I'm not sure," said Charlie. "Maybe she can use magic to turn the teeth into
something else. Maybe she can tap it with her wand and turn one tooth into a
giant castle, like the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella did with the pumpkin. Maybe
everyone where she's from lives in a big, fine tooth-house."

"But the new teeth—they stay forever?" I asked.

Charlie smiled and tapped his own teeth. "These are the ones I got when I lost
my baby teeth. See? They're still strong. They stay with you your whole life."

"You had baby teeth too?"

"Yes, they all fell out, like they're supposed to. That's how stuff works," he said.

I tried to picture Charlie as a kid my age, just my size but with a kid-sized
mustache. He used to be just like me. Did that mean that one day I'd be just like
him?

"I don't want to grow up," I said suddenly.

"Why not, Bells?"

"If I grow up, I'll be too big for you to hold me."

"Oh, honey, you'll always be my baby. I'll always hold you—as long as you want
me to."

The cold rain splashed on my cheeks, and I thought how Charlie would never hold
me again. I wasn't wearing shoes, and I sat near the spot where I'd buried him,
my clothes completely damp from the rain and the ground. "Charlie, I've brought
out your Scrabble set. Do you want to play?"

I set up the board and shook the bag with the wooden tiles. "I'm afraid we're out
of candles, so you can't set your bad tiles on fire," I said. The rain would probably
warp the board, maybe ruin it forever. How many years had Charlie carried this
box from one dorm to another, from his first apartment to a string of bachelor
pads before he unpacked this box in the home he'd purchased with his new wife?
How many games had he played on this board? I wonder if he'd known when he'd
first gotten the game that someday he'd be playing and arguing with his daughter
with the same set, the same tiles. Or if he knew that here, in the backyard, in the
rain, on the ground above where he was buried, was where the board would
finally become completely useless.

I drew tiles for both of us. "Ooh, rough hand, Daddy," I said, tracing the letters
on his tiles in the dark. "You got all vowels." I could just hear him muttering
under his breath.

"I'll go first," I said. I always went first, because we went youngest to oldest. I
felt my tiles and put down L, O, N, E. "Lone," I said. "Like the Lone Ranger."

I knew the tiles by heart. "Each tile is one point, and I'm on the double word
score, so eight points. It's your turn."

I grabbed the first of his tiles, an A, and put it in front of the word I'd made. Now
the board said: ALONE.

"Good word, Daddy," I said, "but you get only five points."

I couldn't play anymore. I was too tired to try to play by feel in the dark and the
rain. My sadness overwhelmed me, and I stood up and kicked the board. I could
hear tiles flying, landing with soft thuds on the wet lawn. I began to sob, and I
screamed as loudly as I could toward the skies. "Why me?" I cried. "I hate this. I
hate being alive. I hate being the only one left. Goddammit!" It was sort of
liberating to shout at the top of my lungs, knowing I wouldn't disturb anyone,
that there was no one left to disturb.

"Why won't you answer?" I demanded. "Answer me! Give me a reason," I said,
sinking to my knees. "Give me a reason to live," I sobbed into my hands. I didn't
even know who I was talking to anymore.

I heard a twig snap, and I stilled. Had I really heard something? But then I felt
arms around me, and cold fingers on my face wiped away the hot tears that
mingled with the cool rain.

"For me?" the voice in the dark said.

"Edward?" He couldn't be real, no. I must have fallen asleep. But sleep was
usually more comfortable, more warm.

"Yes, Bella. It's me."

"Are you going to kill me now?"

He was quiet, and all I could hear was my breath and the rain. "No," he said
finally. "Not today."

"I'm so tired," I said, and then my knees buckled. He caught me and lifted me up
as if I were a small child, and carefully carried me into the house.

"You're soaked," he said. "And after I went to all the trouble of finding your
towels."

My teeth began to chatter. "There are more upstairs, in the linen closet."

"I know," he said, and he set me down like a fragile parcel by the mantel. "Can
you stand? Or would you rather sit?"

"I can stand," I said, not wanting to get the furniture damp.

"I'll be right back," he said, and I held onto the mantelpiece.

"You promise?"

But he'd already gone. I heard him lightly step up the stairs and return before I'd
even exhaled.

I couldn't see him, but the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I knew he
was near. He began rubbing me down with a new towel, and I felt like a helpless
baby. My arms hang limply by my sides as he dried me. Water was pooling by my
feet, and I could hear the drip, drip, drip from my clothes and hair onto the tiles
by the fireplace.

"I brought you a clean nightgown," he said. He'd been upstairs for only a second,
but it may have been one of those vampire things.

I let him peel the wet things off me. I held my arms up like a kid as he put the
nightgown over my head. It didn't occur to me to be self-conscious. It was so
dark anyway, and I was confused and still numb, both in body and in mind.

"Come on," he said as he buttoned the top of the nightgown. He wrapped the
towel around my hair, twisted it into a turban—"My sister Alice liked to take
showers, and she always did this to her hair, even though it was so short"—and
picked me up, taking me back to the sofa.

"You should get some sleep," he said, and I leaned against him.

"You're soaking wet too," I said.

"I don't care. It doesn't bother me," he said.

"Well, it bothers me. You're making me cold. My dad has some clothes in his
room. They should be dry. I haven't touched them."

"All right," he sighed, jumping over me. I counted the seconds he was gone,
wondering, again, if I had just imagined that he was here. But my clothes were

dry, and I had a towel in my hair, and before I could wonder how long he would
take, he was already back. Usually, when we'd spent the night on the couch
together, he'd been on the inside, and I'd lain on the edge of the sofa, trying not
to fall out and on the floor.

"Scoot over," he said, and I turned on my side, facing the back of the couch. My
nose touched the cushions. He slipped in behind me, pulling the blanket over us
both.

"Now sleep," he said, and he hummed something I didn't recognize, until I
dreamed of a sky full of stars all singing to me, and a pair of cool arms as large
as the universe.

Chapter 14: Bound

I woke from a wonderful dream, in which I had been no longer alone. Had to
have been a dream, I thought. Nothing's ever that nice. I tried to remember …
arms around me, sweet breath in my ear, the rise and fall of the chest of
someone embracing me … I didn't want to wake up. I wanted the dream to go on
forever.

My stomach growled, and I really had to pee. I wouldn't be able to continue the
dream. "Don't want … to wake up," I mumbled crossly.

"You don't have to if you don't want," someone said, and I was jerked awake in
surprise. I struggled to get up, but I was held fast, encircled by something
strong, unbreakable, like the shoulder harness on a roller coaster. I struggled to
free myself, still half-asleep and beginning to panic.

"Shh," the voice said, and the thing binding me down began to pat my back.

It was no dream.

"Edward?" I asked, my face pressed into one of Charlie's old shirts.

"Yes, I'm here," he said.

"That really happened? Last night? You?"

"I'm here," he repeated.

I pushed up against his chest so I could look him in the face. "You're real," I said.

"I am."

"You came back."

"I did."

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"Because I couldn't stay away from you."

I felt as though we were reciting lines from the Baltimore catechism.

"You were going to kill me," I said.

"I was." He looked away from me, ashamed. "The demon in me sometimes
makes it hard for me to … control myself, Bella. I'm … sorry you had to see that.
Truly sorry."

"It was my fault anyway," I shrugged. "I shouldn't have pushed you. You knew
what you would become."

"Bella, regardless of what you may think of my kind, we do have free will. I failed
you, not the other way around. You were generous with your heart and your
body. I'm … strong again. Stronger, at least."

"So, what was it like?" I asked. "Where did you go?"

We were both sitting up now, side by side on the sofa. He held my hand, drawing
circles on the back of it with his cool fingertip.

"At first, I forced myself not to move. I pretended I'd been nailed to the earth; I
imagined metal spikes were impaling my feet. I made myself believe in it,
convinced myself I felt the searing pain, so that I would be strong enough not to
follow you, not to hunt you down."

I shivered, and he rearranged the blanket around me. "How long were you
there?" I asked through chattering teeth.

"I watched you run away, and I pierced my feet over and over in my mind. I
don't know how long. Time … I always had trouble understanding time. Lifetimes
used to pass in one blink of an eye, and now? Now that there is no one, time
seems to reflect back upon itself in a loop, into infinite regress."

I nodded. I understood the stretch of time, the hopelessness, just wishing it
would finally all just end.

"When I felt strong enough not to follow you, I began to run. I ran in ever-
widening circles so I could be sure not to find you by accident. I ran all the way to
the shore, all the way back into the eastern edge of the state, but I couldn't bear
to leave Washington, not when I knew you were within its borders."

"Did you find anything? Did you see anyone else?"

Edward leaned his head back onto the sofa cushions, looking straight up at the
ceiling. "There's no one here, Bella. Not in this state. Not anywhere I passed on
the way here to you. Maybe in some corner of the earth, some may have
survived, maybe if they went underground before the worst came."

Before he answered, I had dared to hope we weren't the last ones, that maybe I
just hadn't traveled far enough to find others, and now I felt the crushing
disappointment. What if he had found someone, just one more person? Maybe I
wouldn't have felt so hopeless that this was the end, and that this was some
horrible purgatory I had to atone in until I finally died and joined the others.

But what had I ever done to deserve this? Was it because of Jacob?

"How can you be sure?" I asked.

"I can smell them, Bella. I can hear thoughts of any living thing—except for you.
It's been silent out there for a long time now. I used to pray for silence, for the
stilling of all the noise in my head. I was so foolish," he said. "Maybe this is my
punishment."

"Maybe it's mine," I said.

"You, Bella?" he asked, sitting up again and looking deeply into my eyes. "What
could you possibly have done? You are an innocent."

I thought of Jacob in his casket, dead before he'd been kissed, and I thought of
the blood seeping out of the gunshot wound of the boy who'd tried to attack me.
"Not so innocent," I said, hanging my head down in shame.

"I don't believe that."

I just stared at my hands, feeling the ghost of the sting of the pistol recoiling as I
pulled the trigger. "You don't know much about me, Edward."

He tipped my head up with one finger. "No matter what sins you may have
committed on this earth, you are still an innocent. I could taste it in your blood—
the blood you so willingly gave me."

"That's preposterous," I said. "You can't … possibly taste that."

"I have tasted the blood of murderers and sinners and the worst examples of
humanity. Your blood is pure."

His eyes darkened for a moment, and I became afraid. He turned away from me,
clenching his fists and breathing in and out, in and out, grinding his teeth
together. "I'm sorry," he said after a while. "I almost lost control again. I should
leave you."

"No, don't!" I grabbed one of his hands and placed it on my cheek. "I would
rather die by your hand than live alone. I can't … I just can't be alone anymore."

"Bella, you don't know how dangerous I can be."

"Kill me then," I said. "Kill me. If you need to leave, promise me you'll kill me
first."

He sucked air between his teeth and shook his head vigorously. "No. I cannot
make such a promise. You don't know what you're asking for."

"You can't leave me." My palms began to sweat, and the room seemed to shrink
and expand as if I were in the belly of some great beast. I gestured around me as
I fought the feeling of vertigo. "This is no way to live. If you're here, I … I have a
reason to wake up in the morning. If you go, I'll have nothing. If you go, I'd
rather feel nothing. I'd rather be gone." I was shrieking now, tearing at my hair
and rocking back and forth.

He tried to untangle my fingers from my matted hair, but I held fast. "Hush," he
said. "I won't go anywhere."

"You can kill me," I said. "If that happens … I'd be okay with that. It would be a
mercy. I would thank you with my dying breath."

"Do you think I could live with myself if I harmed you, Bella?" he asked softly.
"Why do you think I left Forks in the first place? And why I begged you to run
away?"

"Just don't leave me," I said. "If you leave me again …" I thought of the gun
upstairs with one bullet left in it. "I can … finish things … my own way." I didn't
specify, but he still understood.

"Don't you dare," he said, putting his forehead to mine.

"Then don't go away," I said, staring right back at him, forehead to forehead.

We locked eyes, neither of us moving, neither of us breathing. Who would move
first?

Edward broke away at last. "I will stay as long as I can be strong around you," he
said. "And you will promise not to harm yourself."

"I promise no such thing," I said. "I still have a say over my life. Everything—
everyone I love—has been taken from me. Don't take away the last thing I have
left."

"You have more than one thing left, Bella."

"And what's that?" I snapped. "What do I have? Have you looked around? Have
you seen this place? This world? My life? I buried my own father after watching
him die," I said, on the verge of hysteria. "What could I possibly have left?"

"Me," he said quietly. "You have me."

"Do I?"

"You always have."

I laughed bitterly. "You have a funny way of showing it," I said.

"Bella, ever since the moment I met you, I have tried to keep you alive. And at
the time, keeping you alive meant going as far away from you as I could. Now it
seems keeping you alive means staying by your side. And as hard as that is …
there is nowhere else I'd rather be."

"How will we live together?" I wondered aloud. "Is this misery for you?"

"Every time your heart beats, I am grateful to be here, even if I had to watch my
family die. Even if all the suffering and horror I saw as this world destroyed itself,
as its inhabitants turned on each other and became like wild animals … if it led
me back to you in this moment, led me to be sitting by your side underneath a
blanket with your warm body pressed against mine, this is a good world."

My stomach growled again, and Edward said, "You should get some food in you.
Are you strong enough to feed yourself?"

"I am not a child," I said, getting up.

It had stopped raining. I walked outside barefoot, feeling the mud squish
between my toes. I walked into the woods in the backyard, hiding behind a thick
tree so Edward couldn't see me relieving myself. I splashed water on my face
from one of the large rain barrels, and drank water greedily out of my cupped
hands, dipping them again and again into the full container. I'd lived with my
thirst for so long that it was strange finally to quench my thirst, to be not
wanting.

When I came back into the house, Edward had set the kitchen table with an
assortment of cans, the can opener, and one place setting. I never used our old
plates anymore—it seemed pointless. In any case, I couldn't waste precious
water to wash dirty dishes.

"I didn't know what you wanted to eat for breakfast," he said sheepishly.

Even though I'd snapped at him earlier for trying to feed me, it was touching to
see the table set. It reminded me of those days when I'd be at school late for
meetings, or doing research at the library, and Charlie would keep dinner warm
for me, one place setting on a single placemat. He knew I loved dessert, but
sometimes we had nothing sweet in the house but candy. He'd line up gummi
bears at the edge of the placemat, and they would act as a silent, disapproving
audience for my late dinner.

"Thank you, Edward," I said. "That's very kind of you." I tried to control the
waver in my voice.

He sat with me and watched me eat. "Doesn't it make you hungry?" I asked.

"That's not … exactly food to me," he said, eyeing my forkful of cold Beefaroni
with distaste.

I laughed. "It's not really food to anyone. You get used to it."

"I lived in Italy for a while, and not once did I see a pasta dish combining the
words 'beef' and the suffix '-roni,'" he said, still puzzled.

"Don't think about it too hard," I said. "You'll hurt yourself. It's not food, and it's
not remotely Italian." I stopped myself from adding, And this isn't any sort of life.

We spent a quiet day at home, our first together where we were both strong and
awake and where my life, as far as I knew, wasn't immediately in danger. He
wanted to read to me, to make up for all the days I'd read to him when he was
too famished to move. I felt much younger than I was as we looked at the
bookshelves together, trying to pick a book to read. No one had read to me in
years.

"Hard Times?" he suggested, pulling a small paperback off the shelf.

I stuck out my tongue. "No Dickens. That shouldn't even be here."

"Do you want swooning Victorian women?" he asked, half-bent over and peering
at a low shelf.

"Not so much," I said.

"Stephen King?"

"No, this world is scary enough as it is."

"Maybe you should just pick," he said.

I turned my head sideways so I could read the spines on the books. I was
suddenly reminded of all those weekends when I had nothing better to do, and
I'd want to watch a movie, but I'd stare at our collection of DVDs, unable to
decide. There were so many choices, that it was paralyzing. Choosing one closed
off all other possibilities.

It was just like me to give up the choice, to leave it to fate. I closed my eyes and
ran my finger along the spines, finally choosing a book that just felt interesting. I
laughed when I opened my eyes. It was a collection of Calvin and Hobbes comic
strips.

"You're serious?" Edward asked as I handed him the anthology.

"Yes. And describe all the pictures to me," I said, settling into my spot on the
couch.

He read panel after panel to me, describing the drawings even though I could
look right over his shoulder at them, and it was funny to see him completely lost,
not understanding the humor. "Why are they named for theologians and
philosophers?" he asked. "And is this tiger real or not? Sometimes he's a stuffed
doll, and sometimes he's alive. Is there some deeper meaning?"

I shrugged. "I haven't read that since I was a little kid. And maybe it doesn't
matter, as long as Calvin thinks he's real."

"Does predestination have anything to do with this?" he asked.

"Just read it," I said, rolling my eyes. I was annoyed, but it was strangely
wonderful to feel annoyed, to feel such a shallow emotion. It was like junk food
for my soul. I hadn't felt such comforting pettiness in a long time.

The sun was setting as he finished the anthology. "I still have no idea what's
going on," he said, and I laughed, a real, deep, belly laugh. "Why is that funny?"
he asked, frowning a little.

"I couldn't explain it if I tried," I said, feeling lighter than I had in ages. "Do you
want to go for a walk?"

"All right," he said, carefully putting the book back in its rightful spot. After I'd
gotten my shoes on, he offered me his arm, and we walked into the dimming
light.

"You can leave the door open," I said. "I always do when I go."

"Why?" he asked.

"Because it reminds me that I belong somewhere, that some place is waiting for
me to come back."

We walked, and for once I did not count my steps. I led him to my favorite trees,
telling him stories I'd imagined for each one, how this one's gnarled branches had
come from a bar brawl the tree had had over a pretty willow on the other side of
the forest. He chuckled. "You are a strange creature," he said.

"I'm not," I said. I wanted him to understand, so I dragged him to the willow in
question. Its supple branches hung down like a curtain around us, and I pulled off
one long frond. "Do you promise to stay with me?" I asked, suddenly turning
serious.

"I do," he said. "As long as I can keep you safe. As long as I'm not a danger to
you."

"That's not good enough," I said. "I'm a danger to myself if you leave."

"Then I must stay," he said, sighing and looking sad.

I wound the frond around our hands. "I bind you to me," I said. "We're one now,
two halves of all that's left alive here. We need each other to survive. We are
bound."

"I was bound to you before now," he said. "You just couldn't see it."

"It was only in your mind. You were bound to me, but I was not bound to you.
Now we are bound to each other."

"What happens now?" he asked.

"I'm not sure," I said, looking at our hands tied together with pale green leaves.

"How about this?" he asked, leaning in and kissing me softly on the lips. I
reached my free hand around his neck to pull him closer to me, and we embraced
under the willow, hidden from the rest of the world. It was as if I could feel
invisible cords tethering my heart to his. I shivered again, but not from cold.
Something had shifted. Something had changed.

The willow branches swayed in the gentle wind as if in dance. He kissed me
again, his cold wrist tied to my warm one, his free arm wrapped around me,
pressing into the small of my back as the leaves rustled in what I imagined was
hushed approval.

Chapter 15: Red

How long did we stand bound together, the willow tree our only witness? For a
while, for longer than I could count, time stopped. If this could be the moment I
could freeze, my forever would be bearable. But all good things come to an end;
only nightmares spin out into eternity. He pulled away from me.

"Was that all right?" he asked, as if he'd hurt me.

I nodded. I wondered if he could hear my heart stutter and lurch.

We stood under the canopy of willow branches with our hands still tied, just
standing quietly, waiting for the sun to finish the day's journey across the sky. I
knew that the sun was actually the fixed point, that we were the ones who were
moving, but from where I stood, it felt as though everything around me changed.
I was the constant.

The earth turned so swiftly on its axis, yet I couldn't feel its motion in my body. I
wondered why that was, but I was also thankful that I couldn't feel the earth's
speed. It had been hard enough to fly, back in the days before the virus, to think
that I was hurtling through space at over 500 miles an hour. How much faster
was I moving all the time, even when standing still?

I got dizzy just considering it, and I stumbled. Edward was there, steadying me.
"You must be hungry," he said.

"No more so than usual," I said. The sun had finally sunk down, leaving us in
pitch blackness. I knew the forest well, but I usually did not venture out after
dark.

"Can you see anything at all?" I asked. I felt as though a blanket had been
thrown over me. I could feel the coolness of his wrist against mine and hear his
footsteps shuffling along the damp forest floor.

"I can see heat. I can see waves coming from your body. Your body is like a
beacon."

"You can … see my body heat?"

"Yeah."

"And you can … I mean, you can see because of my body heat?"

"Pretty much. You light my path."

"Well, keep me from stumbling, then," I said, squeezing his hand. He squeezed
back just a tiny bit, and I wondered how much he had to control himself not to
crush the bones in my hand.

He led us back to the house. I couldn't see a thing, so it was strange to think I
was providing the light for him to find our way home. I knew we were close
because the air around the house was different—maybe it was just … lived in.

Once inside the house, we kicked off our shoes and walked to the sofa. I couldn't
bear to undo the knot that bound us together, and he made no move to either.
So we climbed into the sofa, careful not to pull our arms apart for fear of tearing
the botanic rope. It reminded me, strangely enough, of being in a three-legged
race.

Because our hands were bound, we lay down facing each other, where we
normally would have been facing the same way, or he'd be on his back and I on
my side. There was something almost uncomfortably intimate having my face so
close to his, my exhales becoming his inhales, all our air shared.

I wondered what he would do while I slept.

"You won't go anywhere, right?" I asked.

He just held up our tied hands in response.

"What do you do while I sleep?" I mumbled, already drowsy in his embrace.

"I listen to you breathe. Sometimes you grind your teeth, and I try to stop you. I
hope your dreams aren't disturbing you. I watch your heat light up the room. You
make the walls glow red."

"Isn't that boring?" I said, burying my yawn in his—well, Charlie's—shirt.

"On the contrary," Edward laughed. "Your heart beats. You breathe. You are the
only creature on earth who does these things. You're an anomaly."

I was going to punch him for calling me an anomaly, even though I thought he
didn't mean it in an insulting way, but the day had been exhausting. Just being
around another person's energy, given the amount of food I was eating, was
draining. I supposed that the blood I'd lost had also weakened me.

He hummed a melody, his lips buzzing against my forehead, and I slipped into
peaceful, dreamless slumber.

The sunlight prickled even through my closed eyelids. As I came into
consciousness, the light through my thin skin was tinted red. I wondered if this
was how Edward saw my light in the dark.

I groaned and stretched and slowly opened my eyes. "You're real," I said, as I did
the morning before.

"I am," he said, as if we'd practiced this.

"You came back."

"I did."

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"Because I couldn't stay away from you."

"You were going to kill me," I said.

"I was."

The repetition of yesterday's words was comforting. Patterns, habits, rituals—I
needed them to divide this monotonous forever into bearable pieces. I
understood then that we would repeat these words every morning, for as many
mornings as we had left. I was glad Edward seemed to understand that, even if I
hadn't said as much out loud

The frond from the willow tree had dried out overnight, and its leaves had
become brittle. Some of the leaves had crumpled as I slept, leaving only tiny
stems with a scrap of green. "I suppose we need to cut this," I said.

"We're bound in other ways now," Edward said. "This is merely cosmetic."

He put his hand on the dried frond to break it, and I put my free hand on his, and
without counting out loud or making eye contact, we broke the tie at the same
time.

I wiggled my fingers now that they were free, and my wrist still felt the ghost of
the cord that had tethered me to him. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine it was
still there. I wondered how long this feeling would last.

"Something's changed," I said after we'd sat in silence for a while.

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not sure," I said, gazing out the window. "But something is different. I feel
like … something has fundamentally shifted. Do you feel it?"

"I don't know," he said, and I was glad, at least, that he didn't feel the need to lie
to me.

"Are you hungry?" he asked gently. His body was tensed up, as if he wanted to
leap up and bring me food.

"I'm all right at the moment," I said. "I'm going to change my clothes, and then I
thought maybe we could walk again."

"I think my things ought to be dry by now," Edward said, examining the plaid
flannel shirt he wore. "I feel bad for wearing your dad's clothing."

"I suppose it is a little confusing for me," I admitted.

We both changed, meeting at the top of the stairs. Edward looked less like a
lumberjack in his own clothing, which was a good thing.

"Are we going on the same walk today?" he asked as we left the house, letting
the door swing open behind us.

"I'm not sure," I said.

After we'd walked for a while down the deserted road, I asked, "Am I walking too
slowly for you?"

He smiled, shaking his head. "No human could keep up with me," he said. "I've
grown used to it. It's like the dreams I remember from when I was human, the
ones where you're trying to run away from something, and it's as if your feet are
mired in glue."

"So you're saying that walking with me is like a living nightmare?"

"You would look at it that way, wouldn't you?" he said, a smile creeping onto his
face.

"How fast can you go?" I asked.

"Where do you want to go?"

I looked toward the horizon. "I don't know. Somewhere I haven't been for a
while. I go only as far as I can get in half the daylight. I like coming home every
night."

"Climb onto my back," he said, crouching down so I could hop on.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd had a piggyback ride—maybe one summer
playing chicken in the community pool. I felt like a small kid again. If I closed my
eyes, I could almost smell Charlie again, feel him carrying me after a long outing
when my little legs could carry me no longer.

"Ready?" he asked. "I've got you, but you need to hold on too."

I had my arms wrapped around his neck, and if he were human, I'd probably
have been choking him. But he didn't need to breathe. "I'm holding on," I said.

He began to run, really run, and it was like being on a galloping horse, where the
ground seemed to disappear underneath me, and the world streaked by my eyes,
green and brown and blue. I screamed partially in terror, partially in delight.

"Are you okay?" he panted, not breaking his stride.

"Y-yes," I said, jostled by his steps. His feet were a blur, too fast for me to make
out individual movement.

"Wait!" he said, stopping so suddenly that I nearly flew off his back. His arms
held me close as I slipped forward.

"What is it?"

"Something … something smells different. Like nothing else I've smelled in a long
time," he said, closing his eyes and sniffing the air. He put me gently on my feet
and steadied me as I got my land legs back.

"Different good or different bad?" I asked, my heart beating in my ears. I was
suddenly so afraid—of what, I didn't know. Change?

"I don't know," he said, taking my hand and pulling me along as he sniffed. "This
way," he said.

He kept his eyes closed and let the scent lead him, while I watched, fascinated. I
tried to sniff at the air, but it just smelled like air. Air and green things. We were
rather far out in the country, and maybe things were just a little fresher. Fewer
people had lived here, so there wasn't the ever-present smell of decay as there
was closer to home. The air, especially after the heavy rain, just smelled clean.

He pulled me through a field of waist-high grasses, toward a grove of trees. His
eyes were closed, so I saw it first—a surprising burst of red in the sea of green
and brown.

"Oh," I gasped. "Oh, look." I pointed as he opened his eyes. "Is that what you
smell?"

We walked slowly, silently, as if we were afraid the slightest movement or sound
would make the vision dissolve. We crept, holding our breath. I willed my heart
to beat more quietly, my feet to make less noise.

The red did not fade. The red grew brighter, larger.

We finally were at the tree that was different from all the others, the one branch
bowed toward the ground, straining against the weight of the shiny red orb.

"Can it be?" I whispered, afraid to break the spell.

"Touch it," he said, guiding my hand. I let the red object sit in my cupped hand,
trying not to disturb it, worrying it would shatter if I breathed too hard.

It was an apple, a shiny red apple, the first apple I'd seen since everyone and
everything had died. I thought maybe it was just an illusion, but I bent my head
down and smelled its sweetness. It brought to mind crisp fall days, the sound of
raking, the smell of freshly baked pie and leaves burning. The smell unlocked so
many mundane, forgotten memories that I began to cry.

"I was beginning to think I'd only imagined that smell," I said, still cupping the
apple reverently in my hands.

Edward looked at me and said, "Now you know what I felt when I saw you again."

I stared at the apple, and he stared at me, and neither of us moved. When the
apple bobbed cheerily on its branch, its glossy skin skimming my palms, I could
feel the invisible strings that bound our hearts tugging us even closer. It's here
because of us, I found myself thinking, and I bent my head down to smell its
fragrant skin again to make sure it was real.

Chapter 16: Vibrant

"What are you going to do with it?" he asked as I held the apple in my hands, still
attached to the tree.

My mouth watered imagining biting into the crisp skin, the crunch and burst of
juice, the feel of sweetness sliding down my throat. It had been so long since I'd

eaten anything fresh, anything not completely soft and mush. But if I ate the
apple, it would be gone. Its scent would be lost, and who knew if there'd ever be
another one?

"I don't know," I said, letting my hands drop to my side. The apple bobbed,
dancing on its branch like a puppet on a string.

"It's been a long time since you've had one, hasn't it?" he asked, bringing my
palm up to his face and inhaling deeply. "It's already perfumed your skin."

"What if it's the only one?"

"Would you let it wither and die on the branch just because you fear it's the last
of its kind?"

"That's not the only thing," I said, watching as the apple slowly came to rest. "I
mean, what if it's not very good? What if it ruins my memory of what apples
tasted like?"

I thought of the alternatives. It did seem somehow a shame, a waste, to let the
apple just fall and rot. Then it might have been the last apple, and for what
purpose? Just to look pretty?

"I don't want to decide right now," I said. "It's here, and right now, it's enough
for me to know it exists."

"I know what you mean," he said, brushing my cheek with a cold, rough hand. He
looked up at the sky, trying to estimate the time of day by the position of the
pale sun in the sky. "Do you want to go back now?"

"I don't want to leave this place," I said reaching out to touch the apple again.
"What if we don't find it again?"

"Have you eaten today?" he asked, wrinkling his brow.

"No," I shrugged. My stomach suddenly growled, as if Edward's question had
woken it up.

"You're hungry," he said.

"It's all right."

"You need to eat," he said.

"I don't want to leave here. And I'm not eating that apple. Not until … not until
I've let it live some more."

Edward looked a little sheepish. He dug his hands in his jacket pockets, removing
a small can of tuna and a can opener. The can opener was unfamiliar, and the
brand of tuna was one I'd never seen before.

"Where'd you get these?" I asked. "And how long have you been carrying them
around?"

"When I was running to keep from coming back to kill you," he began, "I'd tear
through houses, hoping to find something if ever I was strong enough to return
to you. A gift. An apology. Whatever I found, I hid in the woods as near to you as
I dared go. I guess I kept some stuff my pockets as a promise to myself that I'd
find you again. When I'd run in the dark, feeling hopeless, I'd squeeze these in

my hands to remind myself there was something worth living for, something
worth controlling the predator inside me."

I noticed the can of tuna was sort of squashed in the middle, with an indentation
that looked as though a thumb might fit into it.

"So, um," he said, looking at the offering in his hands, "are you hungry?"

I nodded, folding my hands over my stomach.

He spread his jacket out on the grass, and we both took off our shoes and socks.
He opened the can for me, cursing a little when he had trouble making the can
opener hinge shut on the edge of the can.

"I'm guessing you never had to open cans in your human life."

"Not so much," he mumbled. "Went straight from stuff in butcher paper to
pulsing jugulars."

"Don't muscle it," I said, coming nearer to guide his hands. "You'll break the
opener. Just line it up and squeeze, like you'd squeeze my hand. You're not trying
to crush it to death. The tuna is already dead." I felt the can opener catch, and
then I put my hand over his to crank the can open. The smell of canned fish came
wafting out, and Edward wrinkled his nose.

"You eat this?" he asked.

"Didn't you ever eat fish when you were human?"

"Sometimes I'd catch fish with my dad, and we'd eat that. This little puck of
foulness has no relation to those fresh fish."

I laughed. "There's nothing fish-like about tuna fish. I had tuna steaks once at a
fancy restaurant for my birthday, and I still don't think the two are related. Tuna
fish is … I don't know. It's its own special category of food-like substances."

Edward pried open the can, possibly to make sure I wouldn't nick myself on the
sharp metal. "Dinner is served," he said, flourishing one hand over the open can.

"You didn't happen to pick up any flatware while you went running, did you?"
Eating at home, I always used utensils. Somehow eating with a fork or spoon
made me feel that I hadn't completely reverted to some feral version of myself. I
didn't want to scoop the tuna out with my fingers. I didn't want my fingers
smelling like tuna for hours, maybe days. I'd rather deal with the gnawing pain in
my stomach than lose this last bit of my once civil life.

Edward looked around, picking up twigs and sticks, weighing them in his hands.
Then he took the lid all the way off the can of tuna. His hands were a blur of
motion, bending, straightening, scraping the edges along his skin. Before I could
ask him what he was doing, he presented me with a tiny spoon he'd fashioned
from the lid. "The sides should be smooth," he said, "but you should still be
careful. I don't want you to cut your mouth or your tongue."

I took the tiny spoon from him in wonder, turning it this way and that in the pale
light. It reminded me of those little wooden spatulas that came with those ice
cream cups we'd have at birthday parties. I remembered the taste of the wood on
my tongue, the contrast between the warm, rough wood and the cool, sweet,
cold ice cream. I tested the spoon out, touching the edges carefully with a
fingertip. I was amazed at how smooth the edges were. I touched Edward's

hands and made him open his palms. I could see tiny metal shavings in his
hands, and I gently blew them away. "Didn't that hurt?" I asked.

"Very little can pierce my skin," he said, closing his eyes when he felt my breath
on his palms.

"Thank you," I said, folding my legs under me as I began to eat. It was strange
to eat as he watched me, and I felt suddenly naked and exposed as I chewed,
even though my mouth was closed. Every swallow felt unbearably intimate,
private, and I blushed.

"Are you all right?" he asked. His hands reached for my face, presumably to
check for fever.

I waved him off. "Yes, yes, I'm fine." I shoveled more tuna into my mouth,
deciding I'd try to get the eating part finished as quickly as possible.

"I like watching you eat," he said as he cocked his head to the side.

I nearly choked mid-bite. "Why?" I felt so disgusting to him.

"It reminds me that you're still alive," he said.

I slowed down my chewing, already less self-conscious. I looked toward the tree,
to the one red apple, as I swallowed my bites of processed fish. I could feel his
gaze on me, but it was okay now, somehow, just knowing that the sight of me
brought him happiness.

I wanted to make him happy. And it was easy. I could do it by being human,
doing human things. It was strange and a little sad how much our expectations
had changed, how what we needed to be happy had devolved to such basic
things. I was happy not to be alone, and he was happy watching me eat from a
dented can.

When I'd finished eating, I put the tiny spoon inside the can and set both down
on the grass by his jacket. I wanted to kiss him again, as we had under the tree,
but I knew my mouth would taste nasty.

"What now?" he asked.

"Will you just … hold me?" I asked. "Can we lie here on your blanket and just
pretend we've gone on a picnic? That it's fall, and the apples are ready to be
picked, and we're together?"

"We can," he said, lying down.

I curled up inside his arms, and he held me to his chest. I stared at the apple
hanging a few trees away, one bright burst of red in the middle of the brown and
green and gray, red like the blood that had flowed from me into the donation
bag.

I shivered a little in the wind, and Edward said, "I wish I could keep you warm."

"It's okay. I'm not really cold," I lied, and I snuggled more deeply against his
chest.

I shifted on his jacket until I was facing him, and I tilted my face up to look in his
eyes. "What are you thinking of, little one?" he asked, smoothing my hair back.

I wish you'd kiss me again, I thought, but I didn't dare ask him. I looked into his
eyes, dark and tinged with red.

"Were your eyes always this color?" I asked.

He turned away, ashamed. "No. They ... are this way because I drank human
blood."

My blood.

"What color were they ... I mean, before?"

"I don't remember for sure, but I think they were green, when I was human. We
didn't have color photographs then, not that I have any." He was quiet then,
sorrowful. "By the time I realized who I was, my family and my home were gone.
There was nothing left, no objects to remind me of who I was."

I touched his arm to try to draw him out of his sadness. "And when you became
... what you are, your eyes were always red?"

He shook his head, making sure not to make eye contact with me. "They were
golden, amber. They were that way when I fed on only animal."

"I ... made your eyes that way? I'm sorry," I said quietly. "You don't like your red
eyes," I said.

"Don't you feel guilty on my account," he sighed. "I know your intentions were
good." Finally he looked at me again, and I peered into his dark eyes tinged with
red, eyes from a nightmare. But in their place, I imagined other eyes, warm and
amber and full of goodness, and then I had to drop my gaze because I felt like
my soul was seeping out. My heart beat erratically even remembering that kiss
under the willow. He bent his head toward mine and laid a gentle kiss on my
forehead. He bent down again, and without thinking, I tilted my face up to his,
and we kissed again. He wrapped his arms around me and turned until I was on
top of him, and I wondered what we might look like from a plane or a satellite in
the sky, two bodies tangled in the tall grasses on a worn coat, with nothing
around for miles—perhaps nothing around forever.

I hadn't realized I'd fallen asleep until I woke up in the darkness. "Edward?" I
whispered.

"I'm here, Bella," he said.

"Is this real?"

"I'm not sure," he said, and even though I couldn't see him, I knew he was
bending down to kiss me again. I closed my eyes, and we kissed, and he ran his
hands up and down my arms, my sides, smiling through his kiss when my heart
skipped and trembled.

My eyes fluttered shut, and I had no idea how long we lay there in the dark,
kissing and touching, until light began to glow behind my closed eyes.

"Is it morning?" I whispered, eyes still closed.

"Yes."

Another day. "You're real," I said.

"I am," he answered, knowing this was what I needed.

"You came back."

"I did."

"Why are you here?" I asked, my eyes still closed. I was still half-asleep, not
even sure how much sleep I'd gotten the night before, everything a half-dream of
kissing and wanting.

"Because I couldn't stay away from you," he whispered hoarsely.

"You were going to kill me," I said, stifling a yawn.

"I was."

I snuggled against his chest for a minute, marveling again that I was not waking
up alone.

"Open your eyes, Bella," he urged gently.

I let my eyes open, and I gasped as I looked around us. I pushed off of him,
pushed myself to sitting, and I rubbed my eyes to make sure I wasn't seeing
things.

"Is this real?" I asked.

"I can see it too," he said.

All around us, flowers were in bloom, reds and purples and blues and yellows, an
entire meadow of wildflowers. We'd lain down in a monochromatic field but woken
up in this explosion of color. Edward reached over, picking one stem of Queen
Anne's Lace, brushing the cluster of tiny blossoms across my face, a careful,
tender embrace.

"How …?" I couldn't even finish my question.

He shrugged, not stopping the gentle roving of the Queen Anne's Lace.

"How are you still alive?" he asked. "There are so many things I don't
understand."

"Is it because of us?" I asked. "Of what we did?"

"What did we do?" he asked, smiling a little.

"I don't know," I said, looking at my knees.

"The world sings for you, Isabella," Edward said, gesturing toward the flowers
that seemed to be bowing their heads in greeting.

Chapter 17: Languid

After the night in the field with the apple and the miracle of the wildflowers, I
wasn't sure if I were still dreaming. I asked Edward again and again how I knew
this was real.

"Does it matter?" he asked, and I wondered if he tried to be enigmatic to infuriate
me or if his riddles made some sort of sense to him.

I pinched my arms to see if I were dreaming, to see if I could make myself wake
up. Then it occurred to me what an odd thing it was—that pain from pinching
would be the litmus test of the reality of a situation. As if you couldn't feel, or at
least imagine, physical pain in dreams. I'd had plenty of dreams where I'd been
stabbed or choked or even murdered, and I remembered the cold dread that
poured over me as if I'd been dumped into a bucket of ice water. What was that
called, when you threw vegetables into cold water to stop them from cooking? I
hadn't cooked in so long that that part of my brain was rusty. Blanching?

Maybe it wasn't so rusty in there after all. Maybe I wouldn't devolve back to some
primate. Maybe everything was there, hidden under the surface. Maybe memories
were like perennials, not annuals, and they were just sleeping, waiting for
conditions to be right again. Maybe like the earth here was just sleeping, waiting
for Edward to find me.

Not dead, just sleeping.

"What are you doing?" he asked, looking at me when I winced.

"I'm pinching myself," I said.

"Why would you do that?" he asked, and he reached up to stop my hand.

"I want to know if I'm going to wake up," I said. "This is all too beautiful to be
real, and I know I'll wake up by myself in the dark, and none of this will have
happened, and my dad will be dead in the backyard, and I'll be the only one
alive, and I don't think I can handle it."

"Then why would you try to wake yourself up, if that's what's waiting for you on
the other side?"

"Because I'd rather know. It's worse when I forget, because I hope. And hope is
… cruel. If I could just give up and accept reality, expect nothing, it would be
easier. The longer I stay here in this perfect place, the harder it will be to wake
up."

"So wake up," he said.

"I'm trying." I scrunched up my face, made fists, held my breath.

Edward laughed at me. "Is it working, Isabella?"

"No," I sighed, opening my eyes.

"Maybe it's not a dream," he said.

"Don't say that."

"Why not?"

"Because it can't be real. It's too beautiful. I'm too happy. You're just making it
worse." I hugged my arms around myself against the breeze, watching the
flowers wave and bob.

"Let me ask you something, Bella."

"All right," I said, expecting something profound.

"Do you have to go to the bathroom?"

I was too shocked to be embarrassed. I barked out a laugh. "Pardon?" I asked.

"Do you have to go to the bathroom?" he repeated.

"That's, um, none of your business," I said. "And why are you asking me?"

"I was just thinking, I don't remember having to go to the bathroom in dreams,
back when I was human. It was a long time ago, but I remember that there was
dream logic, and bathrooms weren't really even part of it."

"They didn't even have indoor plumbing when you were human, did they?"

"God, Bella," Edward said, rolling his eyes. "I'm old, but I'm not ancient."

I suddenly got the giggles, and the absurdity of this conversation should have
convinced me that I was, indeed, dreaming.

"What's so funny?" he asked, smiling.

"I don't know," I said. "This whole situation is ludicrous."

"All I'm saying," Edward remarked, trying to stay serious, "is that if you have no
need to go to the bathroom at all, if you are not hungry or thirsty at all, then
maybe you are asleep. But if you feel these mundane needs, then perhaps you
are awake after all."

I poked at my stomach, which rumbled loudly.

"Sometimes in my dreams, I can fly," I said.

"Well, fly then," Edward commanded.

I concentrated, trying to make wings sprout of my shoulders.

"How's that working out for you?" he asked after a minute or two.

"It's not working … today," I said. "But that doesn't necessarily mean I'm not
asleep."

"You didn't have this problem the other day, waking with me."

"That was different," I said. And it was. I was in my house. Charlie's grave was
still visible out the kitchen window, the ruined Scrabble board lying as evidence of
my desperation the night before.

"Stay with me in this dream, if you still believe it to be a dream," he said, holding
his hand out. "Walk with me."

He took a moment to collect his coat from the grass, and our bodies had made an
impression in the grass. I watched as the crushed blades uncurled, reaching for
the sun, as if the grass were growing right before my eyes like a stop-action film
I'd watched in biology class. My dreams would never be this detailed.

His hand was cool in mine, and we walked around what was now a beautiful
meadow, fragrant with blossoms. We went back to the apple tree with the one
apple hanging low on the branch. "I remember you," I said to the apple.

We walked a little farther, and about a hundred yards from where we had lain on
Edward's coat, the flowers stopped. The land was barren again. When I saw the

endless fading green in front of me, I began to believe that perhaps I was not
dreaming after all. I turned around and looked at the kaleidoscope of color we'd
left behind.

"Do you still think you are dreaming, little one?"

"Maybe not," I said.

"Would you like to go back home?"

I thought about it. This was a place of beauty and hope, and part of me never
wanted to leave, for fear we might never find this field again. Maybe the minute
we stepped off the land, it would revert, that this was only a temporary glimpse,
an echo of the past, of our lives before. Maybe we should stay until everything
here died as well, so we would see the beauty out to its final place, not wasting
one moment of lushness, just in case it never came back. But then again, maybe
I didn't want to see anything else die in front of me. Maybe I wanted to preserve
this place in my mind, perfect as it was.

"Home," I decided. "But do you think you could find this place again?"

Edward looked at the sky, spread his arms wide, and smelled the air slowly as he
turned. He was committing it to memory, plugging it into his vampire GPS or
whatever it was. "Yes," he said. "I know. I've let this place leave an imprint in my
body. And the color waves from the flowers will be visible from a long distance."
He walked to me and plucked several strands of hair from my head.

"Ow! Why did you do that?" I asked, rubbing my scalp.

He wound the hair around and around the branch where the apple hung.
"Insurance," he said. "Even if my eyes should fail, even if the flowers should fade,
I will be able to find this place again, because it'll be the only other place in the
whole world that smells like you."

"Goodbye, apple," I said. "We'll see you again soon."

"Are you ready?" he asked, crouching down so I could hop onto his back. I
nodded and climbed on.

The trip back seemed faster than the one there, and I turned as he ran, so I
could see all the colors of the field blur, combine, and finally disappear. When I
could no longer make out any color, I leaned my head on his shoulder and closed
my eyes as he ran. Even as exhilarating as it was, going at such high speeds,
feeling the wind on my face, I managed to fall asleep.

"We're here, Bella," Edward said. "You should eat. Maybe you'd like to take a nap
after?"

Edward put me on my feet in front of the house, where the door hung cheerily
open, waiting for our return. "Hi, house," I said. "I hope you weren't too lonely
without me—us."

My legs were a little shaky, so he offered his arm and helped me up the steps
into the house. I felt rather as if I'd just been on a long road trip with Charlie,
cooped up in the car, feeling tired and hungry and shaky. It was the first time I'd
spent a whole night away from the house since our last vacation together.

"Why are we going to the ocean?" I asked.

"Just in case," Charlie said. "It's good to see where we came from."

"Where we came from? Wasn't I born in Forks?"

"I mean life, Bella. Multi-celled organisms. Humanity. Sometimes when things
make no sense, it's good to go back to the origins."

People had already begun to panic, and most of the shops on the shore were
boarded up to stop the looters. Charlie had made sandwiches, which he pulled
out of a wrinkled and grease-stained paper grocery bag. We ate as we walked
toward the water. The air smelled all wrong. The water seemed turbulent. It
wasn't until we walked closer that I realized the waves were filled with dead fish,
rolling in the water as the waves lapped onto the shore. Some of the carcasses
would remain on the sand, the others swept back into the sea, only to wash up
on shore again and again. "Oh," I gasped, unable to finish my sandwich.

"It wasn't supposed to be this way," said Charlie. He seemed panicked for the
first time since this whole thing had begun. "Oh, Bells," he said, holding me to his
chest, "this was never supposed to happen, not in our lifetimes."

I was not used to seeing Charlie so scared, so vulnerable. "No, Dad," I said.
"Don't. Please."

He wouldn't let me go, and as he sobbed, I watched the ocean regurgitate the
dead fish onto shore and suck them back down, only to do it again and again.

"Don't cry, Dad," I said. "You're scaring me."

"What's going to happen?" he whispered. "I thought Billy was just being
paranoid." It was as if he couldn't even hear me. "You're just a kid," he said. "It's
not fair."

"Dad!" I yelled, pushing him away from me. "I need you to be the strong one! I'm
the kid! You're the adult! If you … if you break down, I have nothing. I may as
well just walk into the water with all those dead fish."

That seemed to make Charlie snap out of it. "No, you won't. I … forbid you to do
anything stupid."

Normally I'd be pissed off that he was ordering me around as if I were a kid. But
right now, I needed a father. I wanted to be treated like a child. I wanted to be
carried and tucked into bed, and to believe the scariest thing was a friendly
monster or two under the bed.

We stayed in a hotel that night, even though we could have driven home in an
hour or so. "It's our special trip, just like old times, right, Bells?" Charlie had said.

At the time it hadn't occurred to me that this might—and would—be our last
together away from the house. Within two months, he'd be dead, and I'd be
alone.

The air conditioning had broken, so we slept with the windows open, the smell of
death heavy in the air. The rotting fish odor started making me gag. And as much
as I needed the breeze to cool the third-floor room down, I needed to be away
from that smell. So we closed the windows, opting instead for hot, stagnant air.

Charlie had paid in cash—the credit card readers were no longer working, or so
said the greasy man at reception. I suspected he didn't expect the world to be
around much longer, and he just wanted to enjoy the cash while he still could.

When we went home the next morning, Charlie and I were both artificially
cheery, neither of us wanting to upset the other, neither wanting to show the

other how hopeless and helpless we felt at this moment. We drove without
speaking, and when we got back the house, Charlie steadied me on my feet as he
helped me into the house. I leaned heavily into his side as we climbed up the
steep stairs.

"It's going to be okay, kiddo," he said, kissing the top of my head, but it was
pretty clear that neither of us believed it.

"Are we going to be okay?" I asked as Edward helped me inside.

"I don't know," he said, and I again appreciated the honesty.

"I'm tired," I announced suddenly. Edward began to move toward the living room
couch—our spot. "No," I said. "Come upstairs. Come to my bedroom."

"All right," he said. "If you're sure."

"The couch is crowded—that's all," I said hastily, hoping he wasn't getting the
wrong idea. I'd never had a boy in my bed before. I supposed a centenarian
vampire wasn't quite a boy, but still.

I pulled him into my bedroom. "Take off your shoes," I said as I unlaced my own.
I got under the covers and waited. My eyelids were heavy, and I was nearly
asleep again before I realized Edward was still just standing there, watching me.

"Get in here," I said, holding the blanket up.

Dutifully he crawled into my bed, wrapping his arms around me, and I never
knew my bed could be such a place of comfort. It had been a place of rest for a
time, and then a place I dreaded, and now, it was something different,
transformed as the field we'd slept in the night before. I felt less that everything
was a dream now that we'd returned to the house, although I was so sleepy that
my memory of the field of wildflowers was already hazy and fading away.

"It was real," I mumbled as I began to fall asleep in the pale sunlight, stretching
languidly like a cat as Edward settled into the bed.

"Of course it was," he said, and every contour of his body fit into mine as we
curled into each other beneath my familiar comforter. I pointed my toes and did a
slow mermaid-like kick to feel the cool sheets against my skin, trying to match
the cool body holding me close and safe, as safe as I could be in this puzzling
shell of a world.

Chapter 18: Obsession

And so began some of the happiest days of my new life, the life that began after
the end of the world. I was no longer alone; Edward was constantly by my side.
We didn't always talk, but it was a tremendous gift to have someone to talk to,
someone real. No longer did I feel obligated to talk endlessly to inanimate
objects; no longer was I afraid that I'd lose speech entirely if I didn't practice.
Edward was here to listen, to talk, to sing me to sleep, to shush me when I cried
out in dreams.

I liked to think I brought something special to him to, some joy in living. When I
would wake up in the morning, he was always gazing at me. "Did you watch me
sleep all night?" I asked one morning, after we'd gone through our usual waking
ritual, our own Baltimore Catechism.

"You're beautiful when you sleep," he said.

"Not when I'm awake?"

"It's different. Your face transforms, and it's like you're enchanted. It's almost
like you become someone else."

"Do you want me to be someone else?"

He smiled and shook his head. "No, of course not. It's just that I can see when
your face is peaceful, what you might have been like when things were normal."

"You know what?" I said. "Sometimes I wonder if that other life was a dream.
Maybe things have always been like this, and I've always been alone. Every day
'normal' seems further away and that much closer to insanity, if I believe it was
real."

"What about the photographs and the books?" Edward asked. "You're in the
photos, and the people you remember and loved."

"Sometimes I have dreams," I said slowly, "and I wake up missing something so
badly, and I know it can't have been real. So maybe these pictures are the
same—they make me miss something I've never really known. Maybe these
memories were just planted here after the photos." I shrugged.

Edward looked at me with concern. "We have to remember. We have to believe it
was real."

"Why?" I asked. "There's no hope left. There's no way to return to that time, if
that time were ever real."

"If we forget our dead, we lose all ties to this earth. I know what I know. And my
human life, it is hazy and like the memory you describe, an almost-forgotten
dream. But I know. I know because of this locket, and the faded photograph
inside."

He dug in his pocket and produced a tarnished silver locket. With a sharp
fingernail he popped the locket open. "This was my mother."

She was beautiful, and looked quite a bit like Edward. Her hair was done up like a
Gibson girl's, and she had a perfect rosebud mouth. "How can you be sure?" I
asked, returning the locket after examining the yellowed photograph inside.

He clenched his jaw, and his eyes looked dark and dangerous. "I have to believe.
It's a choice. I have to remember where I came from.

"In a way, Bella, what you are experiencing now was a lot like what I went
through when I was first transformed. My previous life was gone, and there was
no returning. I couldn't remember any of it. It was too easy to believe I'd always
been this way, this monster, this murderer. But I decided I would believe in the
good, in the past, as painful as it was to remember, knowing I'd lost it forever."

"It just hurts so much," I said, rubbing my hand against my sternum, as if to fill
the emptiness inside my chest.

"I know. But I'd rather hurt than pretend it never happened."

I was not like Edward. I'd rather not hurt. It was like when he'd run away from
me when we'd first met—it was easier to pretend that I'd imagined it all, that he
hadn't existed. But would I forget Charlie? Would I pretend he didn't exist? I
thought of his pillow in the room down the hallway. I hardly ever went in there
now that Edward was here. It did hurt less now that Edward was here, but the
space he filled in my heart wasn't quite the same dimensions as the one that
Charlie had left behind. It was like having one puzzle piece left, which almost but
did not quite fit the chink like a blight remaining in the mountain landscape or
twee basket of puppies.

It would be so easy to pretend my old life had been a dream, those happy, easy
times. They'd been imaginary, a fantasy, childish make-believe. It made it more
bearable to live in this barren world. I tried to remember what it was like after I
realized that Santa Claus didn't exist. Did my world end? Well, not exactly. There
was a sadness realizing that magic wasn't real, but I felt even more loved
knowing how far my parents had gone in order to bring magic into my life. It was
a loss of innocence, but a strengthening of love.

Pretending Charlie had never existed would be entirely selfish on my part. I'd be
erasing the love, the sacrifice, the memory of the great man who had been my
father. But oh god, it hurt; I hurt every moment I was alive because Charlie was
not.

It was then that I realized that the pain of Charlie's absence was sort of a
privilege. It meant that I had known this great man, had loved and had been
loved by him. I would wear my grief as a badge, grateful for the pain, even if it
made it harder every morning to wake up and pretend my life was normal.

"You're right," I finally said. "I guess I'd rather hurt and have it be real." I looked
out the window, remembering the days I'd see cars drive slowly past, children
running to catch the school bus. "I hate this life. I hate our now."

Edward wrapped his cool fingers around my hand. "All of it? Even me?" he asked.

"Oh, no, Edward, you make it okay to wake up," I said. "I used to live just
because Charlie worked so hard to make sure I'd survive. I wanted to die, but I
owed it to him. I knew he'd be disappointed, somehow. But there was no joy. I
have joy now, at least little slivers of it."

Edward smiled one of his rare, childlike, full smiles, his eyes lighting up. I tipped
my face up and basked in the glow I imagined radiating from his eyes. "I'm glad
you're happy," he said.

"Happy may be too strong a word," I said. "Happy makes it sound like a more
constant, more content state. I don't see how anyone could be happy under these
circumstances. But I didn't think I'd ever feel joy again."

Day after day I awoke in his arms, and we traveled often to the meadow. I had
hoped flowers would begin to bloom everywhere, not just in that field so far from
home. But it was only this little place that lived and thrived. When he would bring
me to the meadow, I'd seek out our apple, the first apple in a long time. Maybe it
was the last apple.

"Are you going to eat it?" Edward asked one day as I cupped it in my hands. The
skin had begun to shrivel, and the apple was past its prime.

"Not yet," I said, letting my nose graze across the fragrant skin. "It might be the
last one."

As the weeks went by, I noticed that Edward was gradually growing weaker.
Getting to the meadow took a bit longer each time. I knew he would need to eat
again in the near future, but I didn't know if he'd let me feed him again. I looked
at the faded bruise inside the crook of my elbow. How long had it been since that
day when he'd nearly killed me? The puncture wounds in my shoulders had long
since scabbed over. I tried to remember how often you were allowed to donate
blood. Every two months? Had it been that long? I no longer felt lightheaded
when I stood up quickly. Surely it would be all right to take out another pint.

The question was, would Edward let me?

We were in the meadow again, and Edward breathed shallowly, worn out from
our trip here. The apple was fading and shrinking, its skin puckering, its flesh
drying out and becoming soft. An apple from the time before would have long
rotted away, been eaten from the inside out by bugs or worms. But there was
something entirely sterile about the air here, and the apple itself was a slice of
the impossible. It shouldn't have been here, the same way I shouldn't have still
been alive.

"You really should eat it," Edward said when he opened his eyes to see me
sniffing the apple. "It's not going to be good much longer."

I looked at him, his face gaunt again. "What about you?" I asked.

"I don't eat."

"You know what I mean. You haven't eaten since … that day."

"I'll be fine."

"You know you won't," I insisted. "We already know what happens when you
don't eat. I need you to be okay. I don't mind."

"I can't take from you, Bella."

"But you give me so much. You don't even know it." I was practically in tears. "I
can't be here without you. You make me want to live. You want me to eat that
apple, don't you?"

He nodded.

"Why? Why is it so important to you?"

"Because you haven't eaten anything fresh in so long. I know it'll bring you a
moment of pleasure. And it's a waste to let it just rot away on the branch."

"It's a waste?"

"Yes. It's such a rare thing, a miracle."

"You could say the same about me," I said.

"Of course you're a miracle," he said, closing his eyes and draping his arm over
his face.

"That's not what I mean. I'm saying that there is no reason I should still be alive.
And you're starving. I'm healthy. I'm strong. I have enough for both of us."

"No, Bella, that last time was a mistake. You saw what I did to you, what I almost
did to you."

"It's hypocritical for you to expect me to eat the apple if you refuse to let me feed
you."

He still protested weakly, but it was his very weakness that made me push him. I
needed him alert and strong.

"We can be careful," I said. "I can take the blood out like I did last time, but
you'll run far from me before you drink from it. You'll run as far as you can, as
long as you can, until you drop from exhaustion. I'll stay here. If you could
control yourself when you had me pinned to the ground, you'll be able to stop
yourself from coming after me. You won't even be able to smell my scent in the
air."

I could tell Edward was trying to think of excuses, but I could also see the hunger
taking over.

"I'll eat the apple," I said. "But only if you promise you'll feed."

"I don't like it, Bella," he said.

"You don't have a choice," I said, and I marched over to the tree and twisted the
apple off the branch. I had imagined biting into this apple many times, and I'd
always seen myself taking time, savoring it, turning the fruit in my hands,
smelling every inch of its surface before sinking my teeth into it, piercing the
skin, sucking out the juice. Now, though, I was so angry and desperate that I bit
into it without ritual or care.

Even so, that bite, that first bite … I had forgotten how good food could taste.
Even though the apple was not at its peak, even though I would have turned my
nose up at this apple if it had been in the fruit bin at the supermarket in the time
before, it was the most amazing thing I had ever eaten. I became like an animal,
devouring the fruit, even down to the seeds. Apple seeds contain trace amounts
of cyanide, I thought, but I didn't care. I could not waste any part of this miracle.

The rest of the world disappeared, and all that existed was me and this apple,
which tasted like it had somehow managed to transform the pale and ineffectual
sunlight into pure sweetness. I ate until nothing was left but the withered stem.
My chin was sticky with juice.

"Now, will you?" I asked, flinging the stem to the ground.

"I never agreed," Edward said.

I sank to my knees. I'd lost the apple, and Edward still would not feed. I would be
left with nothing. "But you must," I wept. "You must. I need you here. Please."

"Bella," began Edward.

"Please," I whispered. "You're all I have left."

Neither of us spoke as the sun made its lazy journey across the sky.

"All right," he answered finally.

This time, it worked, just as we'd planned. I went back to the clinic to get
supplies and to draw the blood on my own. It was easier since I knew what to
expect. Edward looked ashamed as I handed him the bag. I liked to think that

part of that apple was now in the blood, that Edward would get to taste the last
apple too.

"I don't like this," he said as he buttoned his jacket.

"You don't have to," I said. "Just do it."

"Stay in the house, Bella," he said, kissing the top of my head. "I don't know
when I'll be back. I don't know how long it will take for me to be safe."

"I need you strong. I'll wait for you forever. Just promise to come back."

"I can't. I don't know what will happen."

"Just promise, even if you don't mean it."

"I promise I'll be back."

"Thank you," I said, and I pushed him roughly out the door. He took off running,
his head down, his shoulders hunched, and I watched, clutching the doorknob,
until he was a point on the horizon.

In one blink, he was gone, but I stood staring out the door until my legs began to
shake from fatigue and my stomach twisted in knots from hunger. I tapped the
bandage on my arm, feeling slightly comforted that part of me traveled with him
wherever he went, like the faded photograph of his mother's face in his pocket.

Chapter 19: Morose

A week. It had been a week since Edward had disappeared on the horizon,
clutching a bag filled with my blood. He hadn't come back. I didn't normally keep
track of the days, but this seemed important. With each faint sunrise, I scratched
another mark into the wall by my closet door with the edge of a butter knife.
Every morning I would say, "You're real," but Edward would not answer me. I'd
say, "You came back," but he wasn't here. I'd say, "Why are you here?" but he
wasn't. I'd say, "You were going to kill me," and I would see again the image of
him running away from me to stop himself from doing it.

It was hard to find the motivation to wake up these days. Asleep, I'd forget. I
could almost pretend he was still here, but when I woke, my bed was always
empty. I didn't want to be in there without Edward. I couldn't bear to go sleep in
Charlie's bed. And sleeping downstairs on the sofa seemed like going backwards
in time, but in a bad way. When I woke up, I knew there would be no trips to the
meadow, the one piece of land where things were living. I would have no one to
talk to.

Sometimes I'd idly pick up the gun on my desk, feeling its heft in my hand. I
would place the muzzle against my stomach, against my temple, under my chin,
in my mouth, with the automatic, light touch as if I were crossing myself with
holy water. I wondered if I'd ever have the courage to squeeze the trigger. If I
knew it wouldn't hurt, I thought, maybe, someday.

I looked at the bruise on my arm. I guessed it didn't matter how careful I was, or
how swift with the needle—I'd always bruise. He was real, I thought, and I
pushed on the marked skin until I winced in pain. It was strange how eager I was
to feel the pain that reminded me of him, yet how scared I was of the pain that
would … free me. Maybe the difference was that one kind of pain helped sustain
life; the other only ended it.

I wondered what was happening in our meadow. I thought of the strands of my
long hair wound around the branch, like the willow frond I'd used to bind
ourselves to each other. Plant matter had bound warm flesh to cold, and my
keratin bound us to that meadow, wrapped again and again around the branch
where the miracle had occurred. But I had eaten the apple, and I didn't know if
there would ever be another.

I didn't go on my walks. My whole routine had been thrown to shit. If I couldn't
go to the meadow, I didn't want to leave the house—what if Edward came back? I
tried to write out a schedule to fill up my days, broken down into tiny units of
time. I had no working watch, and I no longer had a sense of minutes and hours
aside from the steady ticking of my heart, but I gave myself small tasks to do in
and around the house. Aside from the activities I had to do every day in order to
survive, I added on mundane tasks like:

Dust bookshelves.

Sort books (by color, author, or size, depending on the day).

Take inventory of cans of food.

Check on water levels in rain barrels.

Memorize one Shakespearean sonnet.

Recite yesterday's sonnet in backyard to Charlie.

The only sure way I knew of time's passing, beside the slow journey of the sun
across the sky, was my stomach. My body had grown used to food at set times,
and my day was punctuated by my stomach's growls and complaints. Everything
reminded me of Edward, but especially when I felt the pangs of hunger. I
wondered if this was what he felt all the time, how hard it must have been for
him not to kill me, especially as I slept in his arms, helpless, immobile.

How far had he run before he'd dropped from exhaustion? How far until he felt
safe enough to drink the gift of my blood? And how long until he felt strong
enough not to come back to finish the job?

Eight days. Nine days. Ten days. Ten tick marks scratched in the wall, and still no
Edward. If my books would talk, they would have complained about their
constant shuffling and reorganization. "Not again," I'd imagine them groaning. "I
was just getting comfortable."

I wasn't sure why my books sounded like cranky elderly people in my head.

I stood outside as my schedule dictated, declaiming Shakespeare's Ninth Sonnet
to Charlie's grave:

Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye,

That thou consum'st thy self in single life?

Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die,

The world will wail thee like a makeless wife,

The world will be thy widow and still weep,

That thou no form of thee hast left behind,

When every private widow well may keep,

By children's eyes, her husband's shape in mind:

Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend

Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;

But beauty's waste hath in the world an end,

And kept unused the user so destroys it:

No love toward others in that bosom sits

That on himself such murd'rous shame commits.

"You didn't do that, Dad," I said. "I'm here, and proof that you existed, and your
living memory to the world's widow." I, on the other hand … there would be no
one after me. But there wouldn't be anyone to mourn, either. It's not as if it were
a choice for me not to marry and have kids. I wondered if I even could have
kids—even if Edward came back, and wanted to be with me in that way, and
would agree to it, and not accidentally kill me during the act … we were two
different species. He wasn't exactly alive. And it all was moot anyway, since I
hadn't had my period ever since the disease had come. Maybe that's all the virus
did to me: make me sterile. What a cruel joke—to be allowed to survive, only to
know that I could never create or continue life. That with me would die my entire
race. My stomach growled, and I imagined for a moment that it was my womb,
grieving that it would forever be empty. It was like the trees and plants—nothing
grew; nothing bloomed; nothing reproduced. This world was dead, but for that
one apple, and I'd consumed it so Edward would consume me.

Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye … that line hit me hard, though. I feared I'd
wasted my life, thinking, as all teenagers seemed to, that I was invincible, that
we would never die. Why did I live such a quiet life, only to spend the rest of my
days in utter solitude? If I'd have known how things would have ended, would I
have spent so many Saturday nights at home? At the same time, it seemed
awfully petty and myopic to think that Shakespeare's message to go forth and
multiply would be commentary on my lack of social life. Would it have been
better to have been a cliché, a pregnant teenager? Because at least I'd be leaving
someone behind?

I hated when I got into this circular patterns of thought, like a plane waiting for
clearance to land. What if? What if? If I'd done A, would B have happened? My
actions do not control the world, I said, trying to stop the cycle of my thoughts,
the endless spiral of blame and regret and second-guessing.

"Dad," I said, "I don't know if Edward is going to come back. But I had to do what
I did, right? I had to try to keep him alive, even if it meant not seeing him
again?"

Not even the wind blew in response, and I felt truly alone. I couldn't even pretend
that Charlie was speaking to me in signs from wherever he was. Maybe there was
nothing after this life, just emptiness, a vacuum from which even light could not
escape.

I shuffled back into the house, up the stairs, and opened the door to Charlie's
room. I had such a strange longing to see his handwriting again, to see the
papers and scraps where he'd pressed a pen and put thought to ink. I knew he
had a shoebox of letters in his closet—he'd carefully put my handmade birthday
cards in there. I hoped there might be letters and cards from other people as
well. Even if they weren't in his hand, they were like fishscales that together
made up the iridescent portrait of his life, each a pixel that would make up the
imprint of his life on this earth.

There were several shoeboxes in the closet, and I knew right away which ones
were filled with letters and memorabilia—they were tied with twine and bulging
against the seams. I pulled them all down from the shelves and sat on the floor
of his room, opening box and box, not bothering to keep track of which letter
went where. I could have been more careful, like an archivist in a rare books and
manuscripts library, but I was too alone and too desperate to feel the voices of
other people. I leafed through my clumsily made birthday cards with atrocious
handwriting and botched scissor and glue jobs. I found a letter or two from my
mom, telling him what I'd been up to at school. There were a few Christmas
letters from extended members of the Swan family, all of them strangely alike in
the way that holiday letters tended to be.

And then I found a leather-bound notebook with the mark of the Quileute tribe.
Why would Charlie have had this? I flipped open to the first page and recognized
Billy Black's handwriting, the pen pressed so deeply into the page that it was like
Braille on the other side. I could just picture Billy's thick hand gripping a pen so
tightly that his fingernails would turn white as he pressed and wrote.

Findings, the first page said, and I vaguely remembered that word thrown around
when Billy would be at the house, talking in hushed tones in the kitchen while
Jake and I horsed around in the living room. Even though I didn't think I'd been
paying attention at the time, snatches of conversation came back to me.

"You don't believe all that, do you?" Charlie said.

"We've read the stars. This is what we know. Something bad is coming."

Charlie laughed. "There's always a Doomsday theory floating around—
Nostradamus, the year 2012, all the Y2K scares. It's never anything."

"This is different," Billy had said, smacking something on the table. "This is what
we've seen in the skies, what has come to us in dreams. We've been collecting
data for a while. I wanted you to have this, to read over what we've seen. Just so
you can make informed decisions. I know you trust us and know us and might
take us seriously. No one else not of our people would care to listen."

"All right, Billy," my dad had said, even though he didn't sound sure. He was too
good of a friend to laugh outright. "I'll take a look."

"Are you ready for what's coming?"

He hadn't said, "What might come." He'd known. And what he had known was all
in the pages of this book.

I began to turn the pages, looking at the drawings, photographs taped onto
pages, diagrams of the sky. I couldn't understand everything that was here. "We
have tried to follow every possible path, to see if we can alter the outcome, but
there doesn't seem to be a way out. But we will not give up hope, because that is
not our way."

I left the mess on the floor of Charlie's room and clutched the journal to my
chest. I walked like a zombie down the stairs, feeling tugged by something deep
within my stomach.

It did not surprise me, then, to find Edward standing at the front door, looking
tired and worn and as if he hadn't slept in days. He hasn't slept in years, I
corrected myself.

"I've come back," he said as I stared at him, afraid that if I breathed, he would
disappear, that only my stillness and concentration kept his molecules together.

I nodded, barely moving my head, trying to keep his particles from breaking
apart.

He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around me tightly, and I could feel the
edges of the journal pressing against my chest, four harsh right angles pushing
against my beating heart.

Chapter 20: Lithe

"You're here, you're here, you're here," I repeated like a heartbeat against his
chest, taking in the smell of him through his dust-ridden clothes.

He cautiously wrapped his arms around me, drawing me closer. "I'm back," he
said. "I'm sorry it took so long … I wanted to make sure I was safe to be around
you. I found that the more I taste of your blood, the worse the frenzy grows, and
I would die before I hurt you again."

"Where did you go?" I asked, lowering my hands so Billy Black's journal wasn't
crushing me.

"I ran and kept running," he said. "I ran back the way I'd first come here,
retracing my path to where my family had lived. Maybe I shouldn't have gone
back." He pulled away from me, and not only physically. I could feel him turn
inside himself, hiding in a tiny corner of his mind.

"You went all the way … home?" As I spoke, I was worried that home wasn't the
right word to use, and from the pain I saw in his eyes as he withdrew further I
knew I had chosen my words poorly.

Edward sighed. "Yes. I ran until I couldn't run another step, until my legs felt like
jelly and my lungs burned. I didn't expect to go back. I never planned for it, but
that's where my feet wanted to go."

"Was there anything there?" I reached out to hold his hand. He let me take it, but
it was like dead weight on my palm, a corpse hand.

"Just the house we'd lived in, a shell, like this one. I shouldn't have gone back. I
don't know why I went. I don't know why my body betrayed me like that."

"I'm so sorry," I said, squeezing his hand. "I missed you," I offered, suddenly
feeling ghostly traces of the cold steel of the gun grazing my skin.

"I'm not sorry," he said. "I'm not sorry if it kept you safe." He kissed the top of
my head, and it wasn't until I felt his cool, dry lips on my skin that I truly let
myself feel the chasm Edward's absence had created inside me.

I crumpled into a ball at his feet and wept hysterically, rocking a little. The pain
was just too much. I hadn't realized how much I'd suppressed while he was gone.
It had been unbearable as it was, but this? My previous pain was only a shadow
of what I felt now, an acorn of grief next to a centuries-old oak tree.

"Hush," Edward said, scooping me up in his arms. "I'm here. You're going to be
okay."

He just let me cry as I curled into a tight ball, my limbs wrapped around myself,
as if they were trying to keep my heart from breaking apart. "You know I had to
leave, right? These were your terms."

"I know," I mumbled. "That's not why I'm crying."

"Then why?"

How could I explain the ache in my chest? "I guess I didn't let myself miss you,
really miss you, until you were back. Until it was safe to miss you, because you'd
be right here. So just … let me mourn while you hold me, so my heart can fill up
again as I finally let it drain out."

"As long as you need," he said, holding me tighter.

So we sat until my heart ached no more. He rocked me and hummed in my ear,
and I let myself weep until I thought surely I'd dissolved into a puddle of tears.
And then came a point where I didn't feel much of anything anymore, just a
comforting kind of numbness. "I'm okay now," I said, feeling sheepish.

He made no move to disentangle himself from me, so I closed my eyes and
focused on the feeling of being cradled in his arms. I felt like a small child,
protected. If I concentrated on my breathing and his lips on my hair, I could
pretend that life was normal and we had a future. When reality began creeping
back through the cracks in my mind, I sighed and pulled back a little.

"Tell me more about going away," I said. "I mean, if it doesn't hurt too much. I
want to know what you were doing."

"I told you, I ran until I dropped, and I had returned to my last … home." He
swallowed hard, shaking his head. "Bella, I've never smelled the air so empty of
life. It frightened me. I held the bag of your blood close to me. I was starving,
but I didn't want to lose what part of you I still had, not just yet."

"How long did you wait?" I asked, touching my hand to his cheek. He must have
been starving, but even more lonely to be able to hold off.

"I don't know. A few days. I lay on my back in the bed where had Alice died and
let the bag sit on my chest, and I tried to picture your face etched on the ceiling,
smiling down at me and telling me everything would be all right."

Suddenly I envied him, that at least he had my blood as a tangible reminder of
me. I had nothing but my questionable memories. "How did you decide when it
was time?" I asked.

Edward looked ashamed. He didn't look at me, his voice barely above a whisper.
"When I couldn't think anymore. When the smell of you somehow slipping
through the spaces between the molecules of the plastic bag grew too much for

me to resist. When I stopped being a person with a conscience and turned into a
monster focused only on survival. I don't remember much, just how good it
tasted, even if it wasn't fresh. So … good."

His eyes lost focus for a moment, and then he shoved me off his lap. I yelped as I
landed hard on my elbow.

"I'm sorry," he said, righting me. "I was afraid I'd … do something awful. Even
the memory of your blood changes who I am. Or breaks down the fake, human-
like creature I've fooled myself into believing I am."

I just looked at him, rubbing my elbow.

"And now I've hurt you anyway," he said, reaching a finger out to touch my
elbow, but pulling back at the last moment. "I really shouldn't be here. I'm not
safe."

"No! You promised. You promised you wouldn't leave. It'll be okay. We don't have
to talk about where you went or what you tasted," I bargained. "Just … don't
leave me. I don't care what you are. I don't care if you kill me. Just don't leave
me alone, except … except for when you have to. You know, when you need to
leave to stay alive and strong."

He nodded, but his jaw was tight.

"When did you know you were strong enough to come back?" I asked, hoping
that I wouldn't make him lose himself again.

He shrugged. "I don't know how long it took. I just know when I became aware of
my thoughts again."

"You were gone for ten days," I said.

"Was I? It didn't feel like ten days."

"It was like ten lifetimes," I said.

"I'm sorry."

I shook my head. "No, I should stop talking about it. I asked you to leave. I
begged you to go. You were only trying to do what I wanted." I reached my
hands toward him again, and this time he took them, squeezing gently. "You
didn't even want to go."

"I didn't want to leave you, but I didn't want to put you in danger more," he said.

"But now we know, right? We know we can do this. You didn't hurt me, and
you're strong again, aren't you?" I brought one of his cool hands to my cheek,
which was still a little wet from crying.

"Strong enough, I suppose."

I brightened, thinking of our possible future. "So we can do this, every couple of
months, when you start feeling weak. Now we know what to expect. I can have
you with me, and I can have you strong. I won't mind if you go away for ten
days, now that I know you'll come back."

Edward sighed. "I still don't know about this, Bella. We're not predictable
creatures. Maybe I'll mess up next time."

I glared at him, and he struggled not to smile. "Fine," he said. "I suppose we can
say the experiment was somewhat of a success."

Now that we were calm, still sitting on the floor of the foyer, Edward noticed the
journal in the space between us. "What's that?"

I told him about missing Charlie and needing some physical evidence that he'd
really existed, and finding the journal among his letters and things. "I don't really
understand much of it," I said, flipping open to some of the drawings. "I never
took astronomy—I mean, do high schools even offer that?"

Edward took the journal from my hands and hunched over, studying the pages
with a troubled expression. "These sketches … they're familiar. I recognize the
stars. I don't know how to read them. Carlisle would have known." He looked lost
again for a moment, his eyes darting rapidly from one place to another, his hands
twitching so quickly that they were a blur of hummingbird's wings.

"What is it?" I asked, afraid to still his hands.

"Carlisle … I can't remember. He was already so sick when he realized something
was terribly wrong with the world. He'd lie outside all night and study the stars.
He'd babble some things, but he was so delirious at the end. If I could just
remember …"

"Let's not think of that anymore," I said. "Maybe it's important. Maybe it isn't. But
I know that you're here now, and that my life stopped when you weren't here,
and I just need to feel you by my side."

Even though it was still light out, I pulled Edward behind me and up the stairs. "I
haven't slept well since you've left," I said. "I'm exhausted. Will you lie with me?"

He carefully removed his shoes in response. I pulled back the covers and got in,
my eyelids already heavy. With a creaking of the mattress coils, Edward climbed
in behind me and held me, wrapping his long arms around me like vines. Even
though he was cool to the touch, I felt a warm glow in my belly that radiated
outward. I wondered if Edward could see it.

When I woke, it was dark. "Edward?" I whispered.

"I'm here. I'll always be here," he said.

"Except when you're not," I added.

"Yes, except for then. But I'd never leave you while you slept."

"How long was I out?" I asked, sitting up slowly.

I couldn't see him, no matter how long I tried to let my eyes adjust to the
darkness. There was no light coming from anywhere.

"Time didn't mean much to me before, and it means even less now," he said,
leaning his chin on my shoulder. "But it was a while. You slept like the dead."

I had the strangest image of me lying like the Lady of Shalott in her boat, floating
toward Camelot as her blood slowly froze and stopped flowing altogether. I
shivered. "Can we go to the meadow?" I asked, needing to be surrounded by life.

"Now?" I tried to imagine the puzzled look on his face in the dark.

"Yes, please," I said. "I … I don't want to be here right now."

He took me by the hand and led me through the house, even though I knew the
layout in the dark as well as during the day. The house was as familiar as my own
skin. "Can you see?" I asked.

"Your light glows all the time," he said.

We gathered a blanket and food. I crammed everything into my tattered
backpack as Edward went outside to fill a few empty bottles with the rainwater in
the barrel. Edward helped me find my sweatshirt.

"Ready?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, hoisting the backpack straps onto my arms. "I'll carry the bag so
you can carry me."

We hadn't made the trip at night before, and I was a little afraid as he ran in the
complete darkness. It was like how roller coasters were twice as scary if you
closed your eyes, because you couldn't tell where you were going. Still, at the
same time it was exhilarating, my heart pounding, speeding, singing.

"Will you be able to find your way, even in the dark?" I asked, my voice
unnaturally shaky from being jostled by his steps.

"I can find your scent," he said. "And I can see. We're nearly there now."

Before I knew it, he'd stopped and was lowering me gently back onto my feet. My
teeth were chattering; he'd been running so fast that the cooler night air chilled
me. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"Yeah, I'll be fine. Just give me a moment." I jumped up and down a few times to
try to warm up. I heard low laughter. "What's so funny?" I demanded.

"I wish you could see what I see," he said. "You glowing and bouncing … I'm
reminded of my sister Alice's collection of lava lamps."

I ignored him, unzipping the bag and spreading out the blanket. "Is this where we
slept that first night?"

Though I couldn't see him, I could feel the air around me move as he took in the
surroundings. "I think so," he said.

"Good." I took off my shoes and felt around until I was on the blanket. "Join me?"
I asked.

I looked up at the sky, or at least, I looked up where I knew the sky was, though
I could not see anything. I thought of Edward's father Carlisle and wondered if he
had ever done what we were doing right now. I wondered what he'd seen.

"Edward," I said, "I don't really remember the stars. I mean, I remember that
they were up there, but all I could ever find was Orion. Jake—he was my friend—
tried to teach me, but I didn't have time. I wish I'd listened to him better." About
so many things, I thought, berating myself.

I felt Edward's hand around mine. To my surprise, he nudged my hand into a
pointing position, covered with his own. It was like our hands were spooning. He
raised our hands up to the sky. "There," he pointed with our hands, "was where
the North Star used to be." He waved our hands on a controlled path, invisible to
my eye. "And this was where the Big Dipper was." Another squiggle in the air.
"And the Little Dipper." He reached out farther into the night. "Cassiopeia in her
chair. As punishment, the gods put her upside down for half of the year."

"Would she be upside down now?" I asked.

"I don't know what time it is. We don't really have seasons anymore, do we?"

I wasn't tired after my long sleep, so for hours, until the sky began to lighten so
slowly that I thought I had only imagined the change, Edward traced out
constellations with our hands joined. My shoulders ached from being held up for
so long, but I didn't care. It was as if we were skaters skimming on the smooth
ice of a frozen pond, one perfectly mirroring the other.

Eventually it was light enough to see his face. His eyes, even through a demonic
shade of red, shone with something like love and care.

"Thank you for giving me the stars," I said. I knew it wasn't our morning ritual,
but I hadn't slept, so it seemed not to matter if we did not repeat the familiar
words; we'd already broken the pattern. I sat up slowly, nervous about what I'd
find in our meadow, worried that it had changed or died since the last time we'd
been here.

I looked toward the tree where the apple had been, but the branches were once
again bare, the limbs twisted in angry acute angles. Only white flowers remained
in the grass. The others had disappeared, or died, or perhaps all the colors had
just faded to white. "What happened?" I breathed.

"I don't understand this meadow. Wait a moment," he said, putting his finger to
my lips. "Close your eyes," he said. "I want to try something."

I closed them as instructed, plunged back into darkness, and his lips were on
mine, kissing me gently, then more urgently, until he lowered me to the ground,
bracing the bulk of his weight on his elbows as we kissed and became a tangle of
limbs and fingers grasping hair. The world disappeared until all that existed was
Edward, hovering over me like an angel. I started gasping for breath, and he
became still.

"Why … stop?" I asked, breathing raggedly between words.

"Your heart … it was going so fast, I didn't think it could be good for you," he
said. Then he said, "Oh."

"Oh?"

"Look." And he nudged my head carefully to the side with his hand. Where just
moments before there had been only tiny white flowers, one red poppy stood,
proudly displaying its petals at the sun.

"It happened again," I said. I wondered to myself what would happen if we ever
did more than kissing, and although I knew he could not hear my thoughts, I was
sure he could hear my heart racing.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked, a smile curling around his lips.

"Nothing," I shrugged.

"It's not nothing," he insisted.

"I don't want to talk about it, okay?" My voice reached an embarrassingly high
pitch.

He stopped pressing for answers, just stared at me and grinned like an idiot.

"Shut up," I said.

"I didn't say anything," he said, looking the picture of innocence, though I knew
better.

"Doesn't matter."

We sat for a while, his fingers playing with mine, and I wondered if my heart
glowed anything like the red poppy by our side, defiantly growing in the field of
white flowers.

Chapter 21: Taut

"Why is this happening?" I asked, looking at the scarlet flower. Did red signify
life, or did it signify sin? Or were the two not mutually exclusive?

He shrugged. "Something happens between you and me."

"Why us? Does it matter that it's us? Would it happen to other people, if they
were the last ones?"

"I can't answer your questions, because there is no one else. None of this makes
sense to me, Bella. I'm generally a creature of reason and logic, but my very
existence defies that, as does yours."

"I don't understand," I said, folding my arms around me.

"I'm a mythical creature, or at least I should be—something that should exist
only in stories and nightmares. And you, you should have died out with the rest
of your race. We are both anomalies. We shouldn't be here. So why question the
logic of why our kissing makes the flowers grow? It's fantasy enough that we are
both here, alive, at all."

His nonsense actually made a lot of sense, but I still rested my head on my
knees, considering.

"What's wrong?" he asked, after I hadn't spoken for some time.

"I just wish we had answers once in a while. Real answers. Not crazy suppositions
and everything being so weird, so wrong, that I may as well be crazy. I feel
crazy. Am I crazy, Edward?"

He gently grabbed both of my arms, slowly sliding his hands down over the thick
fabric until he was holding my chilled hands. "You are not crazy, little one. The
world is crazy. But somehow it led me back to you, so maybe it is a merciful kind
of crazy."

I laughed darkly. "Is there such a thing?"

Edward dropped my hands and spread his arms wide. "Here, in this space, you
ask me if such things are possible? Look around. I can't explain it, but I'll accept
it."

"What do we do now?" I asked.

"Today, you mean?"

"I mean, forever."

"Do we have to decide right now?" he asked. "Can't we just live in the moment?"

"Honestly, 'live in the moment'? Jesus, Edward, I've been living in the same
frozen moment since I watched my father die. Every day was the same until you
came back—I don't even know if I should say 'back' since I can't even be certain
that you existed in the first place—and now you come and go like a wild animal,
flowers appear and disappear, I don't know if I dreamed you up, I don't know
why I'm still alive, I don't know why I was spared. Am I blessed? Or is this some
kind of punishment? And if I'm being punished, what could I possibly have done
that was so wrong, that I deserved this?" My voice kept rising steadily until it was
a piercing shriek in the silence of the meadow, and I started to weep hysterically.
Most of the time my mind seemed to shield me from the enormity of everything
that had happened over the last year or so, but every now and again I'd get a
flash in my brain, a snapshot of the tininess of me against the whole of time and
space, and I'd wonder why, why, why I was chosen to be the one left behind.

"I'm real," was all he said, but he didn't touch me. Maybe he was afraid I'd find
out he was just a ghost. Or maybe he was afraid I'd break.

"If I made you up, of course you would lie to me. Why would you admit that you
weren't real? If you say you're not real, wouldn't you disappear?"

He reached for the bottom of my sweatshirt and began pulling it off. I became a
child again, raising my arms to be undressed, even as I continued to sniffle. Once
he'd pulled my sweatshirt off, sending small wisps of hair undulating like
anemone from the static, he hooked his finger inside the collar of my shirt and
tugged gently, exposing first one shoulder, then the other. He touched the faded
puncture wounds he'd made there the first time I'd tried to make him feed. "I'm
real," he said again, tracing the scar with a cool finger. "I did that to you." He
placed his hand over my heart. "You can't see the scars inside, but I made those
too."

I closed my eyes, letting the tears spill down my cheeks, hot streaks against the
cool air.

"I'm real," he repeated. "Only real things can hurt you like this, leave these kinds
of scars."

"Okay," I said, and I gasped when he leaned in and kissed the scars on my
shoulders, first one, then the other.

"I'm real, and I am so sorry."

My heart whirred so fast that it must have sounded like hummingbird's wings to
his ears. I missed hummingbirds, but at the same time I was glad for them that
they were gone. What kind of life was it, to beat your wings so quickly that you
had to eat constantly? Every moment was exhausting, and only about survival. It
didn't seem to far from my life now, except mine was the slow-motion version,
where all I did was eat and sleep and wake and wait. It was all just waiting,

wasn't it? Someday, my food would run out. Charlie had stockpiled as much as he
could, but food now was a nonrenewable resource. There had been the one apple,
but that was it. Nothing new—well, at least edible—had grown since.

"I love listening to your heart," Edward said, interrupting my dark, spiraling
thoughts.

"Oh?" I said.

"It changes. It speaks to me. I can't read your mind, but sometimes your heart
tells me anyway."

"Such a traitor," I muttered. "What does it tell you?"

"It tells me that when I do this," and here he kissed my bare shoulders again,
"you can hardly breathe."

"How—?" I couldn't finish my thought.

"Your heart stutters and skips and sounds like a frightened bird." He pressed his
ear against my chest. "But I won't hurt you again. You're safe, little bird."

"My heart doesn't believe you," I said, raggedly breathing. It felt as though my
heart were reaching out for him, pushing up against his ear with each beat, not
the other way around.

"I would keep time by your heartbeat until the end of the world," he said, leaning
and listening.

"Maybe not so far off," I murmured, looking up at the pale sky. "How much time
do you think is left, Edward?"

He pulled away from me, and my chest ached, missing the pressure of his touch.
He opened his mouth as if to say something, but changed his mind. "We don't
know anything. As far as we know, it could still be millennia away. Long beyond a
human lifespan."

"My lifespan," I said quietly.

"What would you rather? Would you want everything to stop, to be here at the
end of time?"

I ran my fingers through my hair. "I don't know; God, I don't know," I said. "If
someone had asked me before you appeared, I would have said the end couldn't
come soon enough. And even with you here, I think of the future—and it almost
makes me laugh, because … what future? What future could we possibly have? I
guess I just wish we could go back to normal life. I wish I'd died with everyone
else. I don't want to be special. I wish I'd never known this life."

"Not even me?"

I was going to say something snappish, but he looked so sad, and I remembered
how he'd asked me to live for him, how he'd come back when I was ready to give
up everything. "I wish I'd known you before this all had happened. Maybe we
could have had some kind of life together."

He clutched my face in his hands and said, "No, don't you see? The only way we
could be together is like this, with us the only two left. I don't know how it
happened or why, but it's the only way … I would have been too afraid to kill you

otherwise. I never would have come back if I thought you were alive. And I'm not
sorry. Despite everything, despite how much I miss my family, I am not sorry."

I let my hands rest on his. "But I am," I said. "You make me want to live now,
but if I could trade it … to be with Charlie, to wake up unafraid …" I shook my
head. "I would never choose this."

"Even if this was the only way we'd be together?"

I looked into Edward's face. It had gone completely still, no emotion discernible in
his features. The only thing that gave it away was his mouth, lips pressed
together in a taut line.

"Edward," I said, touching my finger to his lips, trying to get them to relax. It
troubled me to see him so unhappy. But I still couldn't lie. "How could you
imagine I'd ever willingly choose this life?"

He wouldn't look me in the eye. "I was foolish to think I would be as important to
you as you are to me."

"It doesn't matter," I said as kindly as I could. "You are the reason I want to live.
The choice isn't mine. I can't trade you in for my old life. I can't undo the disease.
So it's silly to try to say what I would or wouldn't do. It's pointless. You are here,
and I am here, and there is nothing—no one—else. I don't have the power to
change anything. And if I had to be here with one other person, I'm glad it's
you."

Maybe it would have been easier to say that he made it worthwhile, but I would
not lie to him. I'd lost too much to lie. It disrespected the memory of Charlie, of
everyone else I'd loved. I couldn't pretend that I wouldn't trade it all back if I
could get my old life back, the one I'd found monotonous and safe. At least back
then, I'd had the future to dream about. Anything could happen, then. But now?

"Kiss me," Edward interrupted me.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because we are the only ones left, and we don't know what tomorrow will bring,
and I know at least that when we kiss, your heart is happy."

I hesitated. "If I weren't the last, would you feel this way? Would you want to kiss
me?"

"Always."

I wanted to argue with him, convinced he was just hungry and desperate and
lonely, but then I realized I was just robbing myself of the small joys remaining in
the world. Why not? Why fight it? Why look for logic or reason? Just feel, I told
myself.

And so I reached for him, pulled him to me, and kissed him with everything I had
left in me, with as little cynicism as possible. I tried to make my mind blank, my
heart pure. I thought of nothing but him as he lowered me slowly to the blanket.
He traced my faded wounds again, murmuring apologies against my skin. I let
everything go, and I went to a different place. I could feel the earth spin and
hurtle through the galaxy, and I felt something like ecstasy, white-hot joy in my
chest. It prickled through me like pins and needles, and when I opened my eyes
again, I was different. I was someone else.

I was someone who hoped.

"I was wrong," I said.

"What do you mean?"

I looked at him with my new eyes. "I would choose you. I would choose this."

I let him rest his head on my chest as my heart beat secrets against his ear. I
looked up into the sky, at the pale sun.

The sun is a star, I suddenly remembered. It's the only one left, like Edward and
me. Me, Edward, and the sun. We are the last.

In that moment, I didn't think to question why the sun was still here, or what
would happen if it were blown out like the last candle on a birthday cake. I didn't
think to wonder whose wish would be granted as the last light in the heavens was
snuffed out, leaving us in darkness.

Chapter 22: Earnest

When I chose to stop thinking, to stop analyzing, when hope filled my breast and
I decided just to enjoy the gift the universe had given me, my life glimmered
again, a lone candle in a blackout. Did it matter that the tiny flame couldn't beat
back the darkness? Wasn't it enough that the fire existed at all, against all odds?
If I were small enough, a candle flame could be an entire universe to me. And I
would try my hardest to let it. I willed myself to be as small, smaller, than the
wick, surrounded on all sides by fire, slowly consumed, but this was my purpose:
to be consumed.

To live in the moment and to treasure every second meant shutting off my mind
a lot of the time, which I felt was somehow a betrayal to me, my past life, and
everyone I loved who was now gone. But I was determined to be happy, as
happy as I could be in this desiccated shell of world, so like the beetle, long dead,
trapped between the windowpane and the screen of the window in my bedroom.
Maybe everything in the world that had happened so far was really so I could be
with Edward now. This was the only way, as he'd said. He never would have
come back otherwise. And in his weakened state, he was less likely to harm me.

In a way, it was like a reversal of what I'd done when I'd first met Edward, when
he'd seemed to have hated me on sight and run away. To be able to go on, I'd
had to rebuild my memories, erase the past, pretend that first day of school had
never happened. Now I tried to pretend all the parts of my life without Edward
had been the dream. Maybe this was the real world, the world that had been
created just for me, just for him, just for us. It would be enough. I was happy,
when I could forget Bella Swan, daughter of Charlie Swan, who used to live in a
world with flowering trees, animals, and billions of people living their banal lives.

We built a life together, Edward and I, slowly, carefully, ever more trustingly. I
lived for his kisses; he lived to hear my heart beat, to see the blush bloom in my
cheeks. We found comfort and solace in each other, in our conversation, in our
flesh upon flesh. There was no part of me that did not belong to him, and no part
of him that did not belong to me. We were one.

Much as my body, before the illness, used to cycle, to follow like the oceans the
pull of the moon, swell over the month and then let go of the blood that would
have nourished life, Edward followed a certain arc as well. He would start out
strong and gradually wane as we waited for my blood supply to be back up. I was
his inverse, my energy low but gradually waxing as my body replenished itself of
blood. To be safe, we counted sixty days, marking the passage of time in
scratches in the flaking paint in my bedroom doorframe. As we grew closer to
scratching the sixtieth hatch mark, Edward's fingers would tremble, and his skin
would feel like cool, dry paper, like birch bark. "Not long, my love," I would
whisper into his hair as he leaned against me. I'd hold his hand the way he'd
once guided mine to show me where the stars used to be. I'd my hand over his
and help him scratch into the wood to count down the days before he could feed
again.

"Today," I'd say. "Twelve sets of five means sixty days, so it's time." He would
protest, but it was just part of the ritual. He knew as well as I did that he needed
my blood to survive. And unlike in my previous existence, the blood that would
flow from me would nourish life. He lived because of me, because of my body.
And I lived because of him, his beautiful soul.

Once I'd helped Edward to my bed to rest before his long journey, I'd run to the
old clinic, draw the blood, and tell myself as I stared up into the pale sky that I
could survive the separation. He came back. He always came back. And, knowing
that, I was able to resist the call of the cold steel on my desk, the final exit.

It was so hard when he left, though. Again, it was part of the ritual. After Edward
had come back the second time, I'd found Jacob's plain messenger bag in my
closet where it had lain untouched since Jacob's funeral, when Billy Black had led
me to Jacob's room and invited me to take one item back with me to remember
him by.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd been here. How long had the Quileutes shut
down their borders? When had the Blacks last invited us over for dinner?

"Anything, Bella," Billy Black said, a tremor barely discernible in his voice.
"Whatever you want. Jacob loved you."

"I know," I said, but my throat was so dry that no sound came out.

Charlie didn't want me in his room—so afraid I might catch what he had, but I
said I didn't care. I wasn't thinking straight, and everything felt so surreal
anyway. I sat on the edge of Jacob's bed. Had he died here? The bed hadn't been
stripped yet, and I could imagine it was still warm from his body. I brought his
pillow up to my face and sniffed. It smelled just like him. If I closed my eyes, it
was like I was hugging him, as I often did. I squeezed the pillow tightly to my
chest as I cried. It was soft and cool, not at all like Jacob.

I wiped my face dry with my hands and glanced around the room. Jacob's bag
was in the corner. I wondered if he'd just tossed it there when he'd gotten home
from school, not realizing that it was the last time he'd go. Was he already
feverish by then?

I knelt by the bag, emptying it of the heavy, hardcover textbooks. I left in his
notebooks, his chewed-up pencils. "Can I have this?" I asked, holding up the bag.
Billy nodded curtly.

When Charlie and I got home, I emptied the bag on my bed. I flopped on my
stomach and thumbed through his notebooks, crying when I saw Jacob's familiar
handwriting, smiling a little at his doodles, rude caricatures of his less …

attractive teachers. The whole thing was so Jacob that suddenly I couldn't bear it.
I shoved his notebooks under my bed and buried the bag in my closet under a
pile of moth-eaten sweaters that were supposed to go to Goodwill.

I wondered how Jacob would feel, knowing I was using his old schoolbag to help
a vampire transport my blood until he was far enough away not to come and hunt
me down. Would he just think it was weird, or cool, or would he have some sort
of moral objection? Blood, Bella? Vampires? That's so disgusting, and possibly
illegal, I could hear him say in my mind. I imagined myself answering, Since
when do you need a license from the State of Washington to be a vampire? I
could practically see him rolling his eyes at me, a grin hiding behind his mock-
stern expression.

But these thoughts weren't helpful. They did not help me believe my other life
was the dream. I'd shake my head as if I could physically toss these thoughts out
of my brain. Sighing, I would tuck the donation bag of blood inside to keep it
safe, to help me pretend we were a normal couple, that Edward was just going
away on a perfectly boring errand, that he wasn't leaving because he was trying
his hardest not to kill me.

As he waited at the doorway, I played the role of a fifties' housewife, buttoning
up the jacket he didn't need for warmth, handing him the messenger bag with its
precious cargo, bits of me that had flowed right through my heart. I stood on my
tiptoes to peck him on the cheek, imagining myself as June Cleaver. "Do you
have to go away?" I would say, knowing the answer, but still wishing it didn't
have to be this way.

"You know I do. And I thank you for your gift." He would kiss me, and I would
cling to his neck, squeezing him for all I was worth, knowing I couldn't hurt him.

"Don't leave," I'd whisper.

"It's the only way," he'd say, but he'd wait for me to pull away from him even
though he could have tried to pry my fingers one by one from his neck.

"I'm closing my eyes now," I'd say, and we both knew that was the signal. I'd
close my eyes and count to ten, as if we were just playing a game of hide-and-
seek.

When I'd open my eyes, he would already be gone from my field of vision. "Olly
olly oxen free," I'd say under my breath, wishing my words could make him
magically emerge from some silly hiding place. But it would be just me—me and
Charlie's gun. He always comes back, I'd remind myself. He'll come back again.
And I'd try to push thoughts of the gun from my head.

On the other side of my bedroom's doorframe, I would scratch the other days,
the days until my Edward would come back to me. Ten days away, fifty days
together, and then time again for us to part. Edward had taken to hiding letters
around the house for me to find, one per day, as if my house were one gigantic
Advent calendar. Sometimes it was just a sketch he'd drawn of me while I was
sleeping, lit only by the red light he said glowed within me. Sometimes it was a
poem. But mostly he wrote letters while I slept, in those hours he spent alone.

You are breathing slowly, steadily, and I can almost remember what it was like to
be in my mother's womb, this comforting intake and outtake. When you sleep,
your face is so peaceful. Even without your glow, I can sense the calm there.
Sometimes in the night I touch your face, and I can feel you smile against my
hand. It almost makes me wish for blindness, that I could know your beauty only

from skin touching skin, your every emotion making an imprint against my
fingertips.

It took all my self-control not to go searching for all the letters, but I knew how
much worse it would be if I didn't have something to look forward to the next
day. I'd carry the new letter of the day with me, reading it to myself, then out
loud, then to Charlie, then running to the woods, to our willow tree, where I'd
whisper it reverently under the fronds. Sometimes the breeze would kick up, and
the leaves rustling would seem to join me in a symphony of Edward's words,
contrapuntally, in canon, in countermelody.

When I felt the desperation sinking in, I'd run into the center of town and shout
the letter at the top of my lungs. I'd sing the words, wondering if he could hear
me. I'd try not to think of those red eyes, that animal look when the Edward I
loved was overtaken by this savage thing, his other nature.

And on the evening of the tenth day, he would be back on my doorstep as if
nothing had happened, looking healthy and strong. We'd fall into each other's
arms and slowly, carefully reacquaint ourselves with the other's body and scent.

"Where did you go?" I'd ask, even though it was always the same.

"To my last home." He always closed his eyes when he'd say it, as if it hurt too
much to keep his eyes open.

"Did you remember anything?" He told me he would lie on a rock and look up at
the sky, imagining the stars and trying to recall Carlisle's delirious words about
the future.

He'd press his lips together a moment, sigh, and then shake his head. I never
knew if he were telling the truth.

Who knows how long we'd been together, fallen into this predictable routine? I
supposed if I'd counted up all the hatch marks, I could figure out, but in a way, I
didn't want to know about the larger passing of time. I cared only about knowing
how long I had before I could feed Edward again, and to count the days until he
would return to me.

It was long enough that I really did begin to believe that other life had been a
dream, that he had always been my life. When your world is destroyed and a new
one is given, you don't try to make sense of it. There was no way to go back, and
I had to pretend that this was the new normal.

The forty days each cycle we spent together were like little bits of heaven, at
least when I could shut my memory down. I'd avoid the school and the place
where I'd shot that boy, but the fact was that I'd seen horror and violence in
every part of my town. Everywhere but inside my house, and in the grove of
noble trees. And now, our meadow.

We were lying in the meadow in the middle of the day. It was mid-cycle, maybe
day twenty-five, when Edward was still strong enough to carry me here.
Something had been nagging at the back of my head, but I didn't want Edward to
worry. We lay together among the tall grasses, the field now exploding with
delicate oleander, bright foxglove, shockingly blue delphinium. "How long can we
live like this?" I mused. It was probably the last time we could come here this
cycle. One cycle we'd visited too late, overestimating the energy Edward had
remaining. It had taken us two or three days to make it back home. Edward had
had to take too many breaks, and I was nowhere near fast enough to make the

journey home without water or anything to eat. I'd brought enough food and
water only for one day.

We'd rested, and after a few hours he would carry me, and then we would walk
together for a bit, my stomach growling and contracting. Did he always feel like
this, this hungry? Off and on during that journey, I'd believed I would die before
seeing home again. By the time we made it home, we were both so exhausted
that we agreed not to venture to the meadow later than thirty days into the
cycle.

So here we were, one of the last safe days. Carefully he kissed me, made short
work of our clothing, and rolled me on top of him, and there was no one but the
sun and the swaying flowers as witness to our public, yet completely private,
display of love. He always stayed still, afraid he'd accidentally hurt me, but he
never closed his eyes as I rocked on top of him. His pupils would dilate until his
eyes looked nearly black, and he would barely whisper how much he loved me as
his body quivered below and inside mine. Even though I knew we were alone, I
was as quiet as I could be, not wanting to disrupt the serenity of our meadow.

The flowers bloomed around us, bright and audacious, defiant. But always
poisonous. Nothing edible. And the apple tree did not produce fruit again. We
slept out there—maybe once a week before we had to stay closer to the house.
He'd take my hand and trace the constellations again and again until I could
almost remember what the night sky had looked like. If I closed my eyes, I could
imagine pinpricks of light in the in the dark mantle of the heavens.

When we got back to the house the next day, I ate, as slowly as possible, the last
can of pudding. I'd been saving it. I was still warm inside from remembering the
meadow, Edward by my side, and I wanted to live, truly live, in this moment. I
wanted it to be as special as possible.

"Pudding?" asked Edward. "Is it your birthday?"

"Who knows?" I said, carefully licking the back of the spoon. When the spoon just
left lines of steel at the bottom of the can, I dipped my finger in, using it as a
makeshift spatula to get out every last bit. I didn't care if Edward thought I was
some uncultured pig. I suddenly wondered what Edward looked like when he'd
hunted, before, in that other life. Was he tidy and as mannerly as he seemed in
our interactions? Did he take down a zebra and then delicately drape a napkin on
his lap, using the proper utensils to draw the blood? The thought of Edward
wondering which fork was right for bison made me snicker.

"What's so funny?" he asked suspiciously.

"Nothing," I said, but I couldn't stop smiling despite what I knew. I pushed that
other thought away. It wasn't real yet.

"That's probably the last time we can go to the meadow," he said, taking the
empty can of pudding from my hand.

"I know."

"But we'll go back."

I nodded.

We waited out the end of the cycle, taking short walks, sitting under our willow
tree, reading books to each other. He told me so many stories about his family

that I felt like I knew them. This is my real life, I said to myself as I listened. This
is my family.

As we grew closer to sixty marks in the doorframe, Edward talked less and less,
conserving his strength for the big run he'd soon have to make. This is when I'd
tell him stories, read him the last newspaper for the thousandth time even as he
rolled his eyes. "Rolling your eyes saps energy, you know," I said, but I smiled. It
was nice when we could tease each other, be petty. It was so normal, or as
normal as a freak girl and a vampire could be in a world in which they were its
only inhabitants.

"Sixty," I said, helping Edward scratch the diagonal line across the last four lone
straight lines. "Today. You ready?"

"Yes, but I wish you wouldn't."

"You know there's nothing you can do to stop me," I said, kissing him on the
cheek.

He closed his eyes and leaned against me. "I know. You are the most stubborn
girl I have ever met, and I've been around a long time." He chuckled lightly, and
I smiled, even as my heart struggled to pump blood. I hated when he'd leave me,
and the next ten days were going to be especially hard. I had a lot of thinking to
do.

"I'll be back in a bit," I called as I prepared to draw my blood. I left the door open
as I always did, and Edward watched me, leaning against the doorframe. He
always watched when I walked away. Maybe it was because he knew I'd be back
in a few minutes, not ten days.

As I stabbed my arm with the collection needle, I imagined it was Edward's teeth.
I wondered if it would feel this way if he ever did lose control. I cried out, even
though I almost enjoyed the burning sting into my vein. The pain was what it
took to feed him, to make him whole. My body could do that. I'd bear the
discomfort gladly.

I took my time walking back with a fresh bandage in the crook of my elbow, the
bag of blood cradled in my other arm. Heel-toe, heel-toe, counting the steps back
down to zero.

He was waiting there, and he waved weakly. Even though I wanted to run to him
just as I always did when I saw him, I forced myself to keep my steady pace,
slower than my heartbeat, heel-toe, heel-toe. He shut the door behind me as I
went upstairs for Jacob's bag. I slipped the blood inside along with a book. I
scrawled a note with one of Jacob's chewed-up pencils on the back of an old math
worksheet. I love you always, it said. I probably loved you even before I was
born. I wasn't capable of the poetry of Edward's musings that he'd no doubt
hidden all through the house while I was at the old health clinic.

I tucked the note in one of the bag's pockets and walked softly downstairs, where
Edward still stood near the door. I buttoned up his jacket, looped the bag over his
head. I stood on my tiptoes, but instead of a peck on the cheek, I flung my arms
around him, running into him so hard that his back slammed into the door. His
cool arms snaked around my back, and I kissed him so hard. "Be careful out
there," I said, holding my tears back.

"And you."

"Always."

"I'll always come back, Isabella. You know that, right?"

I nodded against his chest. I took a deep breath and pushed him gently away. He
took his cue to open the door.

I closed my eyes, giving him my silent permission to leave. I counted to ten, and
when I looked out the open door, he was already gone.

After straining my eyes, vainly scanning the horizon for his retreating form, I
said, "Olly olly oxen free," and closed the door.

Chapter 23: Apathy

The ten days passed as they always did—agonizingly slowly. But I had other
things on my mind to occupy my time. Should I tell him? I'd have to tell him. We
had no secrets—did we? What am I going to do? My mind spun and twirled on a
Möbius band-like train of thought. I could … but then … no, but what about … and
I'd be back where I started.

I looked in the pantry, remembering what it once looked like, when Charlie was
still alive, when he'd begun stockpiling supplies. The shelves had buckled in the
middle from the weight of the cans and flats of water and soda. It was hard to
believe it was even the same pantry. Again, it felt like another life, a dream. How
long had it been just the two of us, just me and just Edward?

I glanced down at my hands, hands that had loved, hands that had killed, hands
that were now rough and dry. My skin did not seem like it belonged to a
teenager. How old was I now? I didn't even know. I wondered, idly, how many
birthdays I'd had since Charlie died. Maybe I should have kept better track of the
days, but at the time I was in too much shock, too overwhelmed to realize that it
was up to me now to play the role of timekeeper. I had let that last year of my
old life run out, crossing off the days one by one. When I got to December 31,
my stomach dropped as if I were looking over the edge of a steep cliff. This was
the end of measured time. From here on out, I thought, the days aren't labeled.
They don't exist. Time now felt like a long-forgotten bowl of hard candies that
had all fused together, its once discrete units now a strange, inedible mass.

All I had now were scratches in the doorframe upstairs, and they told me only
when Edward would come back, and how long I had before he had to leave me
again.

"Hey," I heard behind me, and I whirled around. Of course I knew today was the
tenth day, but I'd been so lost in my thoughts that I hadn't noticed that Edward
had slipped inside the house.

"You startled me," I said.

He smiled. "I know—I could hear it in your heartbeat. I'm sorry; I thought you
heard me come in."

Any other day I might have teased him about his unfair ninja-sneaking skills and
his obvious advantage over me with his vampire stealth. But my mouth felt dry,

and I was too weighed down to joke around. Of course I was so glad he was
here, but I couldn't stop my mind from racing around the Möbius band again. And
again and again and again. I grew dizzy and leaned against the pantry door,
which I'd hastily shut behind me when Edward had surprised me.

Edward studied my face as his smile slowly faded. "What is it?"

"It's nothing," I said, waving my hand casually.

"Bella," he said. He waited. I tried to make my face impassive. "Bella," he said
again with a pleading look in his eyes. "You know I can't read your thoughts.
What's wrong?"

"I don't want to worry you," I said, grabbing a fistful of my hair.

"Your worries are my worries." He came forward another few steps and pried
back my fingers one by one, kissing each fingertip as he freed my hair. "Come
on. You can tell me anything—you know that."

"It's fine," I said.

"I know you're lying," he said simply as he wrapped his arms around me. "I can't
force you to tell me the truth. I wish you'd trust me with … whatever it is, but I
respect your privacy. We don't have to talk about it."

"Thank you," I whispered against his chest. "Maybe tomorrow."

"Come upstairs?" he asked, gesturing up with his chin. "I missed the sound of
your breath when you sleep. I tried to remember it in the dark, lying on Carlisle's
flat rock, but I just couldn't get it right."

I nodded gratefully. I was exhausted—I never slept well those ten days away
from him. We crept up the stairs in the fading light. The sun was just going down,
but I didn't care. The sight of Edward here took all the energy out of my body,
and I wanted nothing more than to be in his protective hold in my bed.

As we walked up the stairs, something in his jacket pocket thumped against my
leg. "What's that?" I asked, stifling a yawn.

He was silent a moment, as if deciding if he should tell me. "I borrowed Billy
Black's journal."

"Why?"

"Just wanted something to read while I went back to the old place." He shrugged,
not looking me in the eye, and I knew I wasn't the only one not telling the whole
truth.

I stopped walking.

"What?" he asked.

I thought of accusing him of lying, but hadn't I just done the same to him? What
moral ground had I to stand on? "Nothing," I said, deciding to let it go for now.
"Let's go to bed."

He nodded, and we continued up the stairs, Billy Black's journal thumping against
my leg, the dull pain mirroring the one in my head whenever my mind made
another pass around the Möbius band. As we walked through the doorway, I let
Edward pass in front of me, as I stopped and reverently touched the scratches in

the wood that marked our days together. My left hand grazed over the days we'd
been apart; my right over our time together. Closing my eyes, running my hands
up and down the wood on either side of me, I could feel time, feel it in tiny hatch
marks. If I moved my hands faster, it was like our life together in fast forward, a
blur of sensation of our history together. One hand added up our days and nights
as one; the other remembered our days and nights of separation. The funny thing
was that the marks in the wood felt the same under either hand, despite their
opposite meanings. I almost laughed out loud that my hands couldn't tell the
difference, as if it signified something important, but suddenly I was just too tired
to laugh, even in bitterness.

"You all right, Bella?"

"Yes," I whispered, my eyes still closed.

I let him come to me, take me by the hand. He brought me to the edge of the
bed, where I sat down, exhausted. He pulled off one sock, then the other. I let
him undress me like a doll, putting me in my nightclothes. I was bone tired. I
didn't open my eyes. I could hear him begin to change, his jacket falling to the
ground, Billy Black's journal weighing down the fabric. He nudged me into bed
once he'd finished changing into clean clothes.

With hands outstretched, I searched for his body in the voluntary blindness
behind my closed eyes, even as the last rays of sunlight glimmered orange
through the thin skin of my eyelids.

"Sleep, Isabella," he said, brushing the hair out of my face to kiss me on the
forehead. "I want to hear you breathe."

Breathing seemed unnatural then. Is this how I inhale? How I exhale? I asked
myself as my stomach and chest rose and fell, but in a strange rhythm. I
supposed if you concentrated too much on anything automatic like that, you'd
forget how to do it. I wondered what would happen if I thought too much about
my heart beating, the valves in my heart opening and closing. Would my heart
stop altogether?

My mind continued to spin out of control, and I felt as if I were falling through the
galaxy, but then I felt Edward's cold body pressed against me. I clung to him like
a lifeboat. I'm still here, I reminded myself. As long as Edward's here, I won't
disappear. He began to hum something as he continued to smooth my hair and
rub my back.

As much as my mind wanted to continue churning, Edward's voice and touch
were like curare on the tip of a poison dart, paralyzing the synapses in my brain
from firing. There was only a strange kind of blankness, a vague awareness that I
was safe. I forgot to think about breathing, about pumping blood through my
body, and I finally could sleep.

"Good morning," Edward said as I stretched in the bed against him.

"Is it boring for you?" I asked. "Lying here in the dark when you can't talk to
me?"

"No," he said, smiling. "And who says I can't talk to you? I talk to you all night."

"Do you?" I mumbled through a yawn. "What do you say?"

"Well, now, that's between me and Sleeping Bella."

I sat up slowly, stretching my arms above my head. My shirt rode up a little.
Taking advantage of the opportunity, Edward leaned forward and kissed the pale,
exposed skin on my stomach.

I laughed, slapping at his head and trying to twist away from him. This all felt so
normal, light and easy. My brain wasn't all the way awake yet, still occupying that
in-between place where it couldn't remember the heaviness of waking life. And
then there it was, like having the breath knocked out of you from falling hard on
the ground. I stopped squirming, my face frozen mid-smile. I could feel my
cheeks relax out of the smile and my eyes grow dull.

"Bella?"

It took me a while to remember that I was here, that he had said anything.
"Yeah?"

He traced my eyebrows with a fingertip, then the rest of my face: cheekbones,
nose, divot above my lip, the line of my jaw. "Will you ever tell me?" he asked.

I hadn't come up with a solution on my own. Maybe Edward would have a better
idea. Maybe he'd find a way to save us. "Edward," I said, stopping his hand and
lacing my warm fingers, still swollen from sleep, with his ever-cool ones.

Oh, god. How to tell him? Saying it out loud meant it was true. It would make it
true.

But of course it was true.

"I'm listening," he said, bringing our hands over my heart, beat, beating still. I
told myself not to think about my heart, about my valves, lest it stop beating
altogether.

"Edward," I said again, swallowing hard. "I … I'm running out of food. There's
nothing left around the houses here—I don't know how long we've been here. I
didn't think I'd have even this long." I didn't say what I'd been thinking—that I
hadn't believed I would have been able to resist the quick escape of Charlie's gun
for this long, that my will to live would run out far before my food supply. But
Edward had come to me, and he had changed everything.

I wondered what it would feel like to starve to death. How long did Gandhi go
without food? Couldn't you live at least two months on only water? I hoped it
wouldn't hurt to die this way, slowly.

"Bella, it's going to be fine," Edward said. "I can run farther than you can. I'll find
food for you."

"I've been thinking about that," I said. "But we're going to run out eventually.
And then what? How do you see this ending? How can this possibly end well?" I
realized then just how scared I was, how much I had come to embrace this new
life.

"It wouldn't be for a long while," Edward reasoned.

"But if you go out running every day to find food for me, you'll be tired that much
sooner, and I won't be able to give you blood. And you can't travel far carrying
me, and … I don't know if I can be by myself all those hours. I just don't know."

"What do you want?"

I thought of everything I wanted, all I'd once wanted, back then: to grow up, to
figure out what I wanted to do with my life, to meet someone, fall in love, maybe
have a family, to see Charlie as a grandpa, to travel and see the world. Then I
thought of what I'd want now, given the new parameters: everyone I knew, the
life I knew—gone completely.

It was sad how little I wanted now—and sadder still that what I wanted was
impossible.

"I don't want to live like an animal," I said. "I can't go around worrying day to
day if I'll have enough food. I'm so tired of all of it."

"Well," he said slowly, "there is something else—depending on … well, depending
on if you …" He shook his head, looking at his feet.

"What?"

"I shouldn't assume you'd want forever," he said, still not meeting my gaze.

"Edward, I don't even know what you're talking about."

"Do you want to be with me?"

"Of course," I said automatically. "I wouldn't be here now if you hadn't come. I
have no reason to live except for you." I thought of my life before Edward, how
I'd talk to the sky, shout into the emptiness, hearing only my voice, my echo. I
never would have lasted.

"I could … change you," he said finally, looking embarrassed, as if he wished he
could pull the words that hung between us back into his mouth.

I thought of him undressing me last night, putting me in my pajamas. My brain
was working slowly. "Change?"

"I mean, make you like me."

"Like you?"

"A vampire, Bella. You wouldn't need food. We could be together, no matter
what. Until the end of time."

I shivered, letting until the end of time sink in.

Taking in my silence, he said, "It was a stupid idea. Forget it."

My brain started to churn again, adding this new possibility to the mix.

"If I go running now, when I'm strongest, I can probably get at least several
months' worth of food in the next few days," he said, backtracking.

"Shut up, Edward," I said, holding up a hand. "I need to think."

I didn't want him to go away, not so soon after he'd come back. I'd grown so
used to our schedule of fifty days together, ten days apart, that changing it felt
like insanity. I couldn't bear any more time away from him. Could I adjust to it?
No, but I didn't want to be thinking constantly of food supply, and how far away
he was, and when he'd come back. At least right now I knew when he'd be back.

But could I become … like him? Would that be better? He wouldn't ever have to
go away, because I'd be like him. He couldn't hurt me. But then what was I
signing on for? Until the end of time with no food, only it wouldn't kill us.

"Does it … hurt?" I asked.

"What?"

"The … changing." I also wanted to know what it was like to be hungry all the
time. I thought of how weak he was when he'd first arrived here. How long would
it take for both of us to be like that?

"Yes," he said. "I shouldn't even have asked—it's not fair. Yes, it hurts a lot. It's
agony, and you would wish for death. But then you wouldn't hurt anymore."

"How long?"

"About three days. But it would feel much longer."

"Would I still be … me?"

Edward sucked in a breath. "Eventually."

"What does that mean?"

"It's hard to predict what you'd be like at first—maybe like a wild animal. You
remember what I became the first time … with you." He touched the scars on my
shoulders, and I nodded. "It might be like that, or worse. But it might be easier. I
can't say."

I touched my fingers to my neck, finding my pulse. What kind of choice was this?
Die sooner, or be unable to die until the end of time? Was I more afraid to live or
to die? Would I rather live longer by seeing Edward less, as he struggled daily to
scrounge for food to keep me alive? Or would I rather burn alive to stay with him
forever, provided I would even be me after being transformed into a wild thing?
Would I rather just make him stay by my side as my food ran out and I slowly
starved to death?

My brain began its rounds on the Möbius strip again, until I clutched my head in
my hands to stop the feeling of vertigo.

"Bella?" Edward's hands were pressed to my head, trying to alleviate pressure,
feeling for fever or illness.

"I … don't know. I keep trying to make a decision, but, oh, they're all awful. How
can I choose? What would you choose?"

"I want to be with you as long as you want to be with me. The rest doesn't
matter. I can live with the pain and the thirst and the weakening. If I see your
face, if I can bury my nose in the crook of your neck … that's all I need. That's all
I'd ever need."

He looked at me with eyes both hopeful and afraid, waiting for my answer.

And it was as if I'd been injected with curare again, but this time it was both my
mind and whole body that were immobilized by the toxin, unable to decide which
was the best way to live or to die.

Chapter 24: Bitter

A vampire. Edward wanted to change me into a vampire. I supposed I should
have been flattered that he wanted to stay with me forever, even if it meant he'd
lose his one supply of food. He wouldn't care if I became a wild creature for a
while, or if I never came back from that feral state. And he didn't care if we both
slowly starved and weakened, as long as we were together. I imagined ourselves
so tired that we would lie all day on my bed, just holding hands. If the spiders
hadn't all died, they would spin webs around us, slowly weaving the shrouds we
would wear as we turned into nothing more than living statues. We would wait
until the end of time, the two of us, together.

What would it be like? Would we have enough warning before our bodies gave
out totally, to find each other's hands on the bed? And then, would being so
hungry all the time while unable to move be a kind of torture? How much of that
could we feel? Would we slip into something like a coma, where we were barely
aware of what was happening around us?

When Edward found me, he hadn't eaten in months. I remembered how weak he
was. How much worse was it after years?

What were my other options? Would I rather just slowly starve to death? Would I
maybe ask him just to kill me quickly, drain me of my blood? How long would my
last gift sustain him? Would it be long enough? But I knew that he'd never allow
that. He'd never kill me so that he would live. I knew I could push him into it, cut
myself deeply enough that his animal instinct would take over. That part would
be easy. But I couldn't bear the thought of him coming out of his bloodlust and
realizing what he'd done. Could he build a fire and walk into it, immolating
himself?

I realized two things simultaneously: he would burn himself alive, and I could
never make him do that. He wouldn't forgive himself if he killed me. But I also
wasn't sure I wanted to become living stone, alive but too weak to move. What
kind of choice was this? Why me? Why was I chosen to stay alive? Why couldn't I
have died with Charlie in his bed, or fallen ill like everyone else in my class? I
wouldn't have to make this horrible decision—I'd just be gone, sleeping, or …
nothing.

My thoughts flitted, as they so often did, to Charlie's gun. I had had so many
opportunities to use it on myself, but there was that tiny part of me—I supposed
just hard-wired into being a mortal creature—that resisted death no matter how
much I thought I wanted it. In the end, I was a coward, and as harshly as I told
myself to pull the trigger, that survival instinct would not let me. It overrode my
commands.

But Edward could pull the trigger for me. If I asked him to, he wouldn't deny me
anything. If it were what I truly wanted, and I could convince him of it, he could
not force me to stay alive. And maybe afterward, since I had asked him, since he
had killed me with clarity of mind, maybe he would be able to bear it.

Then I thought of him on the couch before I'd given of myself for him to feed,
how tired, how weak. At least he'd had me to talk to. What if he were all alone?
I'd be leaving him the way I would if I merely starved to death, except I'd be
doing it deliberately. Charlie hadn't wanted to die. No one had. I alone had been

given this gift, this stay of execution. Did I owe it to humanity not to toss the gift
away?

"Bella?" Edward finally spoke as I tried to figure out what I wanted, how to
reconcile my wants with what was possible and what was "right."

"Hey," I said, trying to stop my thoughts long enough to be present, truly
present, to speak with him.

"You don't have to make the decision now," he said gently. "Perhaps it was pure
selfishness that made me ask you. I shouldn't have asked."

"No, no," I said, resting my hand on his. "You just wanted me to know all the
options. You were offering me something. You didn't have to, but you wanted to."

"But you don't want this."

I shrugged. "I don't know. I'm not used to making decisions about how I'd prefer
to die. I mean, I figured I'd always die of starvation anyway, unless I …"

"Unless you what?" he pressed, even though he probably knew.

"Unless I finally got the courage to kill myself. To just do it quickly, you know?
Because there's no way—I mean, I would die someday anyway, and maybe it
would be better to have it all over in an instant."

He looked troubled at this casual talk of offing myself. "You don't have to decide
today, you know."

It was true. I just had to figure out how I was going to get my next meal. "I don't
want you to leave me anymore," I said. "If going with you means we both have
less time, I'll take it, because we're near the end anyway, right? I'd rather spend
that time with you, every second." I laughed humorlessly. "I mean, that's about
as wishy-washy an answer as I can give, isn't it? To decide to do nothing? Just
keep on going as we were?"

"Whatever you want."

"I think it's a difference of only days, anyway. How much food can be left out
there? It's a finite amount, and even if you could run far and fast and find enough
for twenty years, that's no sort of life. I'm tired of the time away from you. I'd
rather … just be with you."

"If that's how you feel, then why won't you let me change you? It would be like
that, but forever."

I hung my head down, letting my tangled hair fall like a curtain. "I'm not sure I
want forever," I whispered, "even with you. I'm just … I'm just so tired. I want it
to be over. I want the game to end. All games have to end someday. I guess I
never wanted immortality. I just wanted a normal life."

Edward was quiet for a long time, and when I peeked out at him from underneath
my hair, his eyes seemed so sad, sad that I wouldn't choose forever, even with
him. When he saw me looking at him, he sighed and said, "I understand."

"You're strong today," I said, swinging my legs around on the bed to get up.
"Let's go to the meadow. We can look for food on the way. Let's just have a nice
day together, okay?"

He nodded, and we both got dressed. Should I squander one of my last days this
way, tapping him of his limited energy? But what was the alternative? Lying
about the house all day, hungry and depressed? At least the meadow was
beautiful.

We left the front door open as usual, and I watched the door swing back and
forth slowly. From my perch on Edward's back, I waved goodbye with the hand
not clutching his neck. "Bye, Charlie," I said.

He ran, sniffing the air. "I'm sorry that I can't really smell which houses still
might have cans of food. The metal, it masks a lot. Maybe I'll take a different
route today."

We passed through what might once have been a midsized town. There were
shells of cars, upside down, charred—things must have gotten bad here during
the last, desperate days of these people. There were mostly decomposed bodies
in the street. Edward turned his head and said, "I'm sorry—I shouldn't have
brought you here."

"It's nothing I haven't seen before," I said, which was true. I thought how
colossally fucked up that statement was, that a street littered with the dead had
become as normal a sight as birds hopping on and off the backyard feeder in my
previous life. Christ, I still felt like a child inside. I wanted to cry for that child in
me, that she'd had to grow up so quickly. Even if I had lived in that other,
healthy world, lived a long life even with the normal rate of street crime,
violence, wars, natural disasters, and tragedy, I never would have had to grow up
this much.

It was all so unfair. My eyes were hot with tears, and I pressed my face into
Edward's back, trying to cry as softly as I could. I clenched my jaw to keep from
screaming in frustration, and I just held onto him tightly, breathing in his scent
deeply. His sweet smell numbed my brain, and I let myself get lost in the
Edward-induced mind fog.

"Bella, Bella, look," Edward said, slowly easing me to my feet. He'd found a
grocery store. The windows were smashed in, which was good because the
automatic doors hadn't been working in … god, years? He helped me inside, and
we scrambled through the store, but all the shelves were empty. It figured.
During the last days, people became more and more like wild animals, looting,
killing. They'd picked this store clean like vultures would a carcass in the desert.
There was nothing left, not even a packet of saltines.

"It's okay," I said as Edward slammed his hand into one of the metal shelves. He
bent the whole thing in half, leaving a fist-print in the dusty metal. "We'll find
food in one of these houses."

We walked then, hand in hand, in and out of the empty houses, searching for
anything edible. We found a can of something in one house, a stale box of
crackers in another. Edward loaded up my old backpack, and soon I was again on
his back, and he was running to our meadow.

I shut my eyes again and breathed him in, felt his muscles rippling under me, this
efficient machine. I let the haze come over me, reveling in the blessed oblivion.
Too soon we had arrived at the meadow, and my brain began to churn in thought
again, trying to untangle this knot of how I would choose to die, if I even had a
choice.

No. I would. I would have a choice. I would decide how this story ended.

The meadow was full of colors and sweet scents, the grasses growing high.
Edward quickly picked the most vibrant flowers and wove a crown for my hair.
"You look like Titania," he said, looking at me as if I'd stepped right down from
the heavens. Me, I wasn't so sure Titania ever wore plaid flannel, but I didn't
contradict him. If I wouldn't be able to feed him again, I would bring as much
comfort to him as I could, and he seemed to drink in my image.

"I wish I could see my reflection," I said, winding a lock of hair around my finger.

"I'll show you," he said. He made me lie down on the blanket, and he took time
to fan my hair out, arrange it just so. "Close your eyes," he said.

I could hear him rushing about, leaving me for brief moments, but always coming
back. I could feel when he was studying me; even with my eyes closed, his gaze
burned my skin. Whatever he was doing, he was working furiously. I yawned
widely a few times, and he laughed. "Sleepy, little one?"

"You relax me," I said, stretching my arms wide, bathing in the light I imagined
reflecting from his eyes.

"You can open your eyes now," he said after a time, and he pulled me up to
sitting.

"Oh, Edward," I breathed, looking at the portrait he'd drawn of me using just
petals and leaves and branches. "Is this what I look like to you?"

"This is only a poor facsimile," he said. "The real thing is far more beautiful than
can be portrayed by objects."

"Kiss me," I said, and I didn't think about food or dying or breathing until long
after the sun had set.

"Are you warm enough?" he asked once darkness had fallen, wrapping me in his
arms and tucking the edges of his jacket under me.

"Yes, just fine."

He held me to him and pressed his lips against my hairline. "I love you," he
whispered, even though we were the only souls on earth.

"You too," I said, drifting off. I slept without dreaming.

Something was wrong, terribly wrong. I never slept long after the sun came up.
When I opened my eyes, it was dim out, as if it were sunset. "How long was I
out, Edward?"

He didn't answer me, too busy looking at the sky. I followed his gaze and saw the
sun as I'd never seen it before: twice as large as usual, and a strange, angry red.
A sun made of blood.

"What's happening, Edward?"

"The beginning of the end," he said so quietly that I barely heard him.

"I don't understand."

He pulled Billy Black's journal out from the jacket pocket, flipping rapidly through
the pages. "After the plague destroys the living, the sun will embrace the earth in
mourning, crying in blood," he read.

"Th-that's just a book. It's not real. How do you know that's what it means? Or if
they're even right?" I wrapped my arms around myself even though I wasn't cold.

"I didn't know until I saw the sun come up," he said. "The journal is so vague and
figurative, but this sun—it's not normal, Bella. I've lived a long time, and I've
never seen anything like this."

"So what happens next?"

He flipped ahead a few more pages. "Billy talks about a great turtle throwing off
its shell. I remembered some of what Carlisle would say, toward the end when he
was delirious. He kept talking about broken yolks, eggs cracking, how fragile the
shell was. I thought he was remembering bits of his human life, you know, how
you humans see your lives flash before your eyes, before the end."

"But you don't think that now," I said, drawing my knees to my chest, maybe to
keep myself from shattering into fragments.

"I think there will be an earthquake. And I think that will be the end."

"Oh."

"Just 'oh'?"

The world was going to end, finally. Was it relief I was feeling? Wasn't this what I
had wanted, to get off this ride? "I don't know," I said finally. "I need to think." I
scrunched up my face, trying to understand.

"Is this what you were worried about when you came home?" I asked suddenly.

He just nodded.

"You should have told me."

"Bella, I didn't know if I was right, or how soon any of it would happen. There's
no timeline in the journals, and Carlisle's thoughts were just mad ramblings."

I thought of the earth cracking open like an egg. At least it would be quick, right?
But who knew when it would happen? How would we live day to day, not knowing
if it would be our last?

I surprised myself by becoming furious, ripping up the grass closest to me,
punching at the ground. Edward tried to still me, but I screamed for him to let me
go. "It's just so unfair!"

"What is?" he asked gently.

"Everything! How none of this was ever my choice! These things, everything just
happened to me. I lost everyone I loved. I saw people die in front of me, people
kill each other in the most brutal ways. I lived like a wild thing all alone, and then
you showed up and made me hope. And now it's all going to end, with no
warning. None of it is fair!" My hands were stained with chlorophyll from the
grass I'd destroyed.

"We don't know when, Isabella. It might be years from now."

"Yes, and I might starve to death by then."

"I could change you."

I didn't want to tell him how afraid I was that I wouldn't be myself after. And
then what? Just to die when the world crumbled away beneath us? And enduring
horrible pain and thirst and constant agony, just wishing for death but being
unable to die?

"I can't," I said, shaking my head.

I can't do anything. Nothing was ever my choice. Maybe it was time to decide.
What if … well, what if we would have ample warning before the earthquake?

"Edward? Can I ask you something?"

"Anything."

"Can you promise me something?"

"Of course," he answered automatically.

"Do you swear?"

He placed his hand on my chest. "On your beating heart, I swear."

"I want you to kill me if this earthquake comes. I don't want my death to be just
something that happens to me. I want to be in control of it."

"Bella, I … can't." He squeezed his eyes shut. "You know I can't do that."

"But you promised. Please, please, none of this has been my choice. Let me die
the way I want to. I'd rather you kill me than just be gone, like, poof, smashed
under the hand of God. It'll be like I never existed. There will have been no point
to any of this."

"I don't want to be a monster," he said, kneading his closed eyes with his fists.

I stilled his hands. "It wouldn't be like that. Charlie's gun. You could just shoot
me, right when we feel the earthquake. We'd both be dead soon anyway, right?"

"So why does it matter so much?" He still wouldn't open his eyes.

"Edward, I want to be with you for every moment we have left. I don't know how
long that is. Maybe the journal is wrong. We'll find more food. We'll make it work.
But you have to promise me that if the end is coming, you will kill me first. I will
not let my death just … happen to me. Don't you wish you could have chosen,
being turned?"

"I do."

"You would have chosen to die, wouldn't you?"

"I would," he admitted. "But our choices aren't always good. If I'd chosen to die,
I wouldn't have met you."

"Edward! We are both going to die anyway."

"I can't hurt you."

"But you're hurting me more by not killing me. You're making my entire life this
… passive thing I just sat through, like a passenger in a car. I want at least one
thing, one important thing in my life, to have happened because I willed it so."

"All right," he said. "But maybe the journal and Carlisle are wrong."

"Maybe," I said. "In which case I will stay by your side. We'll move from town to
town, finding food, sleeping wherever. I'll feed you when I can, back to the old
schedule. I'll live for you if you promise me this one thing."

"I don't like the thought of it."

"Well, shit, Edward, I don't like any of it. But can you promise?" I looked at him,
and he finally opened his eyes.

"Yes."

"Yes, what?"

"Yes, I promise to … to kill you if we feel the earthquake coming. If I'm even right
about that. Now you have to promise, too."

I didn't need him to tell me what he wanted from me. "I promise to stay by your
side and not try to harm myself. I will live for you."

"Good."

Just then the wind whipped up, scattering my wilted botanical portrait far and
wide across the meadow. Edward plucked a petal caught in my hair as we
watched my face disappear, no longer with discernible features. We held each
other quietly in the strange, red light, the pieces that represented me simply
becoming absorbed back into the landscape, from where it had come, as if I had
never existed.

Chapter 25: Awe

As with all things in my short and twisted life, I soon grew used to the large,
blood-red sun. The strange light it cast on me, the unnatural ruddiness of my
skin—it became my new normal. It was hard to remember I time when I hadn't
been bathed in red light as if I were nothing but a foil-wrapped burger under an
infrared lamp at some cafeteria. The thought of the sun as a giant lamp keeping
us warm before we were picked and consumed seemed apt, and I'd wonder from
time to time what food Edward and I would be. Maybe I'd be some kind of
chicken sandwich with a sesame seed bun. Edward? What would Edward be? He
was so cold I couldn't imagine his needing to be kept warm. Maybe he was an
iced coffee that someone had accidentally left under the lamps. Oh god, ice. I
remembered ice. I loved ice. It would drive Charlie crazy when I'd crunch ice at
the dinner table. "Grinding bones to make your bread?" he'd ask, shuddering for
effect.

The real question was, who was waiting to consume us? The earth? I could
imagine the earth cracking open, turning into a gaping maw, swallowing us
whole. Maybe it would be like a trash compactor, creaky and crushing. After
Edward shot me, my body would probably squish without a sound, save for the
snap and cracking of my bigger bones. Edward, though … he was made of bone,
or rather, made of something far stronger than bone. Would the pressure of the

earth folding in on us affect his body at all Was he built to survive even this? Or
would the earth show mercy, pulverizing him? What happened to vampires'
bodies? Would he turn into dust and debris? Grinding bones to make your bread,
I thought, imagining the earth like a giant savage beast against whom we were
powerless.

The bottom line was that I didn't know anything. These were all just theories.
And maybe Edward was right. Maybe he'd misread the journal, misinterpreted
Carlisle's words. Maybe this was something the sun had to do to reset itself, like
a total earth reboot. The sun would supernova, and then it would rise, newborn,
like a phoenix. Everything would be back to normal, as if this whole thing were
just some kind of video game where you had unlimited lives. You died, but you
returned again, right in the place where you were killed, blinking on and off a few
times before your body turned solid and you could begin again.

What if we all ended up where we'd died? Dad would be in his bed, Jacob in his
messy room in Billy Black's house. What if the ground broke open and I fell to the
center of the earth? Was that where I'd find myself again, in Earth 2.0?

And Edward? Would he be where he'd died with me, or would he be back in a
hospital bed in Chicago? Would he be the age he would have been if he'd never
been changed? Would he be an old man now, come back to life only to die again,
as a frail human?

The day the sun turned red, the day that Edward promised me he would give me
the death I wanted, was the last time we returned to Charlie's house. We had to
leave—I had sworn I would keep on living, at least until it was time to die, and I
couldn't keep my part of the promise if we continued to stay where there was no
food. Charlie had given me a luggage set for my birthday, my last birthday with
him (how long ago was that?), thinking I could use it when I visited colleges, and,
eventually, when I went away for school. The tags were still attached. I couldn't
remember if I'd ever even taken all the pieces out of the set.

Edward watched me pack. He wasn't sure what I needed, so he sat on the edge
of the bed and observed me flit from one corner of the room to my dresser, to
my closet, out to the hallway, downstairs, and back upstairs. If I went
downstairs, he'd stand at the banister and listen to me rifling through papers. He
tried to guess which books I was taking off the shelves, based on the slapping of
cardboard on the padded flesh on my palms.

"Sounds like a folio," he'd say.

"D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths," I'd say.

"Greek myths? And isn't that book for children?"

"If the world is ending, it kind of makes more sense to me if we've got vengeful,
thunderbolt-throwing gods." I flipped through the book, the musty scent of its old
pages making me feel like a child again. The book fell open to a full-page
illustration of Zeus. I started babbling, "I remember being scandalized when I
realized you could see Zeus's nipple on this page. Man nipples. Or, I guess, god
nipples."

"God nipples?" Edward repeated. I could imagine the smirk on his face just from
the tone of his voice.

"I didn't know what tunic meant. I thought it was a dirty word, so I'd whisper it
into my pillow in the dark, with my door shut, thinking I was being terribly
naughty."

"You are the strangest creature," he laughed, and in that moment, I could almost
forget why I was packing, why I was choosing books: I was leaving forever.

I packed all the needles and blood bags that I'd taken from the clinic. No doubt
we might find other facilities as we searched for food, but I'd rather be prepared.
I took a set of utensils, a large dishpan to hold rainwater, some empty jugs to
pour the collected water in, and managed to fit everything in the largest suitcase
and the rolling duffel.

Charlie's gun went into my backpack, because I wanted it close to me. It was
insurance. And although I knew Edward was a man of his word, part of me still
didn't trust that he wouldn't "accidentally" leave the gun behind or pretend not to
notice if it fell out of one of the bags.

I couldn't tell how late it was when we were ready to go. The sun no longer set.
There was no more darkness. Had we frozen in time? Had the earth just stopped
revolving, like a child's top as it slowed and wobbled and eventually rolled to
stillness on its side? I was tired, though, and my eyelids felt heavy.

"Let's go," I said once Edward had brought both bags downstairs as if they were
tiny brown paper lunches, relics from another time.

I had a sudden, vivid flashback of school mornings at the house, how in the
darkness of the early morning I'd pack my own lunch—when I first moved in,
Charlie had wanted to pack my lunch, thinking that was part of his parental duty.
The first day he'd made a sad sandwich on moldy bread and turkey that smelled
a little off, slathered in about half a jar of mayonnaise. As I eyed the sandwich in
distrust, my fingers pinching the top slice of green-flecked bread, the kids at
school had started a pile of loose change in the middle of the table so I could buy
some gluey mac and cheese from the cafeteria. After that, most days I'd make
myself a peanut butter sandwich (crunchy) on whole wheat, an apple, maybe
some granola. Lost in the memory, I could smell the bread toasting, the feel of
the cool countertop against my stomach as I unscrewed the lid of the peanut
butter jar while Charlie sat at the table behind me, rustling the paper and
gurgling a happy, tuneless song. I wished I'd known then how precious these tiny
moments were at the time. I'd give anything to have that be my everyday life
again, anything to open my eyes and find Charlie behind me, using his forehead
to bend the newspaper back in half so he could turn the page.

"Wait," Edward said. My eyes flew open, and I was shoved roughly back into
reality, the contrast nearly knocking the wind out of me. He set the bags down
lightly, his eyes fixed on the bookshelves. "Don't you want to take your photos?"

I'd thought about it. I'd taken the dusty albums off the shelf, felt their heft in my
hands, and then put them back in place. I didn't know if it was because I felt
those photos belonged here, in our house, or because maybe I didn't want to
have such powerful triggers or even concrete proof of another, happier time. I
didn't think I could bear to look at photos of me in pigtails, blowing out candles
on a birthday cake, Charlie looking at me sternly because I'd taken his picture
without permission. That was a life as long gone and fictional as the Greek myths.
Rather, the Greek myths were far more real to me now, in this world that held no
logic or mercy. As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods / They kill us for their
sport.

"That's not my life anymore," I said, surprised at the lack of emotion in my voice.

"Aren't you afraid you'll forget?"

"I'm more afraid that I'll remember."

Edward nodded and silently hoisted the bags back up, and we stood outside the
house in the pale pink light.

"Wait," I said, just as he'd turned to leave.

I sprinted through the open door, tore through the house, and pushed my way
out the back entrance, stumbling over the stairs down to the backyard. I fell to
the ground face first, arms spread wide on Charlie's grave. "Goodbye, Charlie," I
said, imagining the soft grass on my cheek was his evening stubble. "Maybe I'll
see you soon."

And that was it. The wave of sorrow, panic, whatever, had already passed.
Calmly I walked back through the house, feeling like I wasn't quite in my body.
Edward stood, concerned, right where I'd left him on the front lawn. I walked to
his side and looked back at the house. I waved, as I always did, at the swinging
door, but it didn't feel right. It was time to stop pretending life was normal. There
was no one to say goodbye to, and I wasn't coming back.

I walked up the steps and pulled the door shut behind me.

This part of my life was over. Maybe it had never existed.

And so we became nomads in the never-ending rose light, traveling from one
town to the other. Soon after leaving Forks, Edward found a bicycle that
surprisingly hadn't been destroyed by the desperate last people. The chain was
loose, and the tires had deflated, but Edward fixed it with things he'd picked out
of other people's garages. It made it easier for me to keep up with him and cover
more ground. Edward could save his strength, and we found enough food for me
to keep moving.

It was hard to keep track of time, even more so than before, because the night
and the day had become identical. The sun seemed to draw closer and closer to
us, filling more of the sky every time I awoke. I slept when I was tired, never
sure if I had become nocturnal or if my body's clock was able to stay the same
despite my changing environs. I wondered if this was what it was like to be a
vampire, where your life stretched out into just one long day that lasted forever.

Even though I didn't know how long we'd been wandering, I could tell it had been
a while when Edward started weakening again. He closed his eyes more and
shuffled his feet like he was an old man, but he kept walking, his legs working
when he hadn't the energy to speak. I suspected it was his stubbornness and
willpower that kept his body moving.

I'd have to give him blood.

"Let's stop," I said when we reached a clearing. I spread out our blankets and
pulled Edward down. "Just rest," I said, and he wordlessly stretched out and
ceased moving, a statue barely alive but unable to die. I kissed him on the
forehead before leaving on the bicycle with my backpack of supplies, pedaling
maybe ten miles or so before braking and hopping to the ground.

I was so used to piercing my skin right at the crook of my elbow that I didn't
even flinch or feel the slightest urge to look away. I watched the blood travel

through to the donation bag, the transparent tubing quickly becoming opaque,
impermeable to the pale red light. It reminded me of those old-school glass
thermometers that you'd have to tilt to see the temperature. As the bag filled, I
tried to remember the feeling of the glass bulb under my tongue. The last time
they'd used a glass thermometer on me was sometime when I was a little kid
living with Renee. "Don't bite the glass!" she'd fretted as she pressed her cool
hands to my flushed cheeks.

When I'd clamped the tubing and removed the needle, I ate a stale breakfast bar
we'd found a few days ago. The box had been infested with boll weevils, but they
were long dead, and at this point I wasn't choosy. Just extra protein, I thought as
I bit and chewed, trying not to notice any differences in texture. I just wanted to
get back to Edward, to make him strong again, and I couldn't pedal ten miles
unless I got some food in my stomach.

He hadn't moved at all from his position on the blanket. I knelt beside him,
smoothing his hair away from his eyes. "Hey, you need to eat," I said, stretching
out by his side. I pressed the warm bag into his hands.

"Don't want to leave you," he whispered.

"So don't." Maybe he was accustomed enough to my blood, my scent, that he
wouldn't lose control. And if he lost control, well, wouldn't that be a mercy for
me?

"I'm fine," he said. His voice sounded so hoarse that I imagined his parched
throat, every word rubbing like sandpaper inside his trachea.

I removed the clamp from the donation tube. I threaded the end of it into his
mouth, which was open slightly—probably took less energy to do that than try to
keep his mouth shut.

Weakly he tried to smack my hand away, but I just hushed him. Once the tubing
had passed between his teeth and was nestled between his cheek and molars, I
pressed on the bag. He sputtered a little at first, but then drank greedily, gaining
strength as the bag emptied. It was amazing watching his transformation, his
reawakening. I'd seen this only once before, since he'd been so careful after that
first time to be far from me when he fed.

When the bag was empty, he looked at me with his blood-red eyes, mimicking
the abnormal sun above. He growled as he smelled the air around me. "So
foolish," he mocked, grinning cruelly.

"Edward, you're still in there. You're there. You're stronger than this." I tried to
touch him, but he jumped back, horrified, as he remembered who he was, who I
was.

"B-bella, why?" He seemed so small and helpless then, and he shook violently as
he tried to control himself.

"You were weak."

"You should have let me stay weak." Every word was such an effort with his jaw
clamped shut.

"I need you, Edward. You're the only thing that makes me want to live."

"You're not safe."

"I trust you."

He laughed. "I don't trust me, you tasty morsel." He grinned wider, showing his
teeth.

I put my hand on his cheek. "Remember who you are. You are not the monster."

Something in his demeanor changed, and although his eyes stayed as red as the
blood he'd just consumed, they seemed shameful and afraid.

"I have to go," he said, wrenching away from my touch.

"Don't leave," I begged.

"I'll hurt you." I couldn't tell if it was a warning or a promise.

"Please," I said, reaching for his cool hand. He crouched down low, looked at me
with something like hatred, and ran from me.

I called after him until my voice was ripped to shreds, but he didn't turn back.

I didn't want to sleep, in case he returned. I was hungry but didn't want to
move—what if he came back and couldn't find me? Of course I knew he could
probably follow my scent, but everything felt unsure to me now.

It was the first I'd been alone in a while, and I didn't know if he'd be back. We no
longer had the doorframe to mark our days. We didn't have sunsets to tell us
when one day shifted to the next. We—I—had nothing now.

I sat on the blanket cross-legged and unzipped my backpack slowly, reaching
inside for Charlie's gun. The cold steel reminded me of Edward's hand, and I
pressed it to my cheek and tried to pretend he was touching me. No matter how
hard I tried, I couldn't make myself believe, so I opened my eyes and laid the
gun down on the blanket.

I stared at the gun and wondered where Edward was. I sat up, refusing to sleep,
refusing to eat the last of the stale breakfast bars. Eventually I slumped over
from exhaustion, sleeping with my spine curved, my head on the bit of blanket
between my crossed legs.

I woke up in confusion, my legs asleep, my back aching. Where are you, Edward?
I asked again and again, wishing he could read my thoughts.

I kept vigil for—well, time no longer was definable. I didn't move from the spot
where we'd last been together. I stayed awake as long as I could, but eventually
I'd collapse, sleep fitfully, and wake up, hoping he'd come back. I still didn't eat,
but I allowed myself sips of water, just enough to keep me lucid.

He would come back. He'd have to come back.

I wished I had days, my doorframe, some way to know he was returning. No
matter how horrible my life had become, somehow there was always something
else that could be taken away: sunsets, scratches in wood marking the time,
Edward. Just when I thought I'd already lost everything, I found there was always
more to lose.

I was being shaken awake. "Edward?" I whispered hopefully, but when I sat up, I
saw nothing. The ground was moving. Was this the earthquake?

Was this the end?

"Edward!" I cried out. "I need you!"

I gazed toward the horizon but saw nothing. It was happening, and Edward
wasn't going to keep his promise. I was going to die here alone. How long did I
have? Maybe the earthquake would last days, a slow crumbling away. Or maybe
it would be quick, an egg cracked in half.

He wasn't coming back. It was up to me.

I picked up Charlie's gun, putting it at my temple, then at my stomach, then in
my mouth, and under my chin. Which way would be the most effective, the
quickest, the most merciful?

I didn't realize I was crying until I felt warm drops fall on my legs. "Edward, you
promised!" I shouted at the sky. The sun looked ready to swallow the earth, an
angry red dragon.

I closed my eyes, the gun under my chin. I would count to ten, and then I would
pull the trigger. The ground was bucking beneath me like a wild animal, and I
heard cracking, rumbling, trees falling in the distance.

Ten … nine … eight …

The air smelled of sulfur.

Seven … six … five …

I breathed in the suddenly hot, acrid air.

Four … three … two …

I began to squeeze the trigger.

"Bella!"

I opened my eyes, and there was Edward, standing in front of me.

"Are you a dream?" I asked, lowering the gun and standing up on unstable legs.

"I keep my promises," he said. "I ran back as soon as I felt the ground shake."

"So it's time, then?" I asked, suddenly afraid. Suddenly not sure if I could go
through this.

He just nodded sadly, prying the gun from my fingers.

"How soon?"

"I don't know."

"Where will it hurt the least?" I asked, my voice quavering.

"I think if I get your brain," Edward said, swallowing hard. He put the muzzle of
the gun where I'd had it trained a few moments before. He closed his eyes, as if
he couldn't bear to look at me while he filled his end of the promise.

"Wait," I cried.

He lowered the gun immediately.

I collapsed against him, no longer able to keep my balance on the quaking earth.
He held me up in his strong arms. I took the gun from his hand and tossed it
away. It turned out that this wasn't the way I wanted to die.

"Kiss me," I said.

He crushed me to him, his mouth on mine, and the earth crumbled around us.
There were explosions, fire, but the little patch of ground on which we stood
stayed intact, waiting for something. Waiting for us to be ready.

He kissed down my neck, and I shivered, remembering all our firsts.

Our wrists bound together, his soft kiss.

He slid his hands up the back of my shirt.

"I want you," he said, and I pulled my shirt over my head.

"Never stop kissing me," I said, seeing the earth behind him crumble and
collapse. "Never stop."

"I don't want to hurt you."

"You won't. Just lie there."

And he did his best statue impression as I lowered myself onto him, wincing a
little at the cold and the pain, but feeling so close to him, so close, so together,
so not alone.

We sank to the ground, never breaking contact, always kissing. I could feel the
heat coming from the large crack in the earth closest me.

"Is this all right?"

"More than all right," I said, shy and bold all at once. Was this really me? He kept
his eyes closed as I rocked slowly on him, afraid to move for fear he'd rip me in
two.

Edward fumbled with our clothing, and then we were both naked and unashamed,
a new Adam and Eve. In the corner of my eye, I could see a crack opening the
earth, heading straight to our last intact piece of land. We didn't have much time.

He stayed cool while I sweat from the exertion. He licked my neck. "You taste like
salt," he said.

"Does it taste like my blood?"

"Only a little."

His face, oh how beautiful his face became, brighter than the brightest sun that I
could remember, and his eyes opened in surprise as my body clenched around
him.

"I love you, Bella."

"And I love you, Edward."

The crack kept growing closer, but we moved together on our blanket. I looked in
his eyes as he gazed at me, trying to memorize my face. I had already
memorized his.

"I love you, now and forever," I said, feeling not bitter or angry, but grateful, full
of awe, that I had been able to find him, find such love in this shell of a world.

"Now and forever," he repeated as the ground opened beneath us, and we fell,
his arms still holding me close to him. He would never let me go, no matter how
far we fell, how deep, into the hot air from the collapsing earth's core.

My skin began to prickle and burn, and I cried out in pain. But his cool arms
soothed me, and he kissed me harder than I ever remembered being kissed, until
I forgot the pain, forgot the falling, forgot that this was the end of the world.